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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to The Jac Programming Language

After 6 years of coding almost every day, I'm finally ready to show HN. There's a lot going on here, looking forward to your guy's feedback.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    I've been a longtime member @ HN, but I haven't been a developer. In fact, my only HN submission has been one asking how to learn to code (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820741). My cofounder and I decided to solve the problem by making a simple, interactive way to get started with Codecademy. We'd love your feedback. If you're interested in helping us to get more courses up (on any topic!), please send us an email at [email protected].

    2011 · codecademy.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2IW

    The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…

    Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hey! I’m JC. I’m 17 and part of Hack Club, a nonprofit where we help teenagers ship programming projects with their friends while growing technically. A while ago, I asked myself the question, “How exactly do programming languages work behind the scenes?” It seemed really daunting until I went to a half hour workshop at a high school hackathon about writing a tree-walk interpreter and realized that getting started was actually super fun. This guide is designed in the vein of that - to get people, especially teenagers, started on learning how to build a programming language in a literal…

    2024 · easel.hackclub.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    See what it’s like to program in a language without null.

    2015 · books.thoughtbot.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5IM

    just a wack systems dude tbh

    2018 · h313.info · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hey HN. We're Mus and Isaac - creators of LightLayer. We've been outputting a ton more code since using agentic dev tools. It's been great. But we're starting to see a new bottleneck emerge that's no longer writing the actual code: reviewing code. We’d love to hear from folks here if they’re feeling the inertia of code reviews a lot more these days with the surge in development velocity. For us, it was the reason we decided to pivot what we were working on before, and go full-time on building a workspace aimed at bringing the code review experience up to speed for the AI era. To be clear:…

    2025 · lightlayer.dev · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Stories and wisdom from the panel, for beginner programmers

    2016 · javascriptair.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    HyperDev, the fastest way to bang out code and run it online

    2016 · stackoverflow.blog · its alternatives →

  9. 9MP

    My weekly(ish) video logs tracking my progress of building a completely sound statically typed language and structural editor. The motivation is to make lots of invalid programs unrepresentable.

    2022 · petersaxton.uk · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language

    2017 · julialang.org · its alternatives →

  11. 11IC

    I spent the past week implementing a 1 Layer Neural Net and training it on MNIST within the visual scripting language provided by scratch.mit.edu. It was tedious, but ultimately not too difficult. The code runs incredibly slowly, so much so that 64 samples of MNIST takes 5+ hours to train on my machine. There were a lot of little mini challenges that were fun to overcome (implementing softmax was very tricky). If you're interested, I encourage you to try and improve on it! More details in the linked blog post.

    2024 · bell-boy.github.io · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Give and get instant programming help.

    2016 · its alternatives →

  13. 13GS

    I've worked on several projects writing and implementing specifications (particularly CLN): I've found the specs I write are much better when I quote them in the implementation, so I can see what implementers need to know. Also, when specs change in development, it's almost trivial to find where to update the code. This project is a formalization of my various hacky scripts which ensure the requirements are accurately quoted, and give coverage if any are missing. Not a major Opus, but I hope someone else finds it useful!

    Jul 2026 · greatspectations.org · its alternatives →

  14. 14CP
  15. 15

    Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.

    2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me · its alternatives →

  16. 16JA
  17. 17AA
  18. 18

    A real-time, collaborative compiler.

    2017 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    1h of code x 31 days - because coding is awesome!

    2015 · devember.org · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Here's a video of it in action https://twitter.com/i/status/1667355251773526016 I didn't end up using it that much back then and no one else seems to have cared it existed, but it was a project I used to derust my programming skills and I'm to this day proud of the flamboyant design. To anyone reading this: you don't have to let your old code rot away in the graveyard of distant memories just because times change. With enough persistence and a little perseverance anything is possible. Code doesn't have an expiration date. -day

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21JA
  22. 22

    Greetings HN, I have been working on a new programming language for the last 3 years and thought it was time to share it with some people. The core of the language is done and i have been using it to create all software related to the language: the compiler itself, the website and vman (valk manager, like npm). There's still alot of work todo but was hoping for some feedback. Maybe an interesting feature of the language is (so i think) that it's the first language with a stateful garbage collector. It basically knows what memory goes out of scope and which doesn't without having to scan for…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23
  24. 24

    Hi everyone, I just saw a vibe coded game on HN, and thought maybe I should post about this here. I'm organizing a vibe coding game dev competition called Vibe Jam. Last year we did it too and there was 1000+ games submitted. This year the deadline is May 1 and you can submit your games until then. There's $35,000 in prizes with the Gold prize being $20,000. Let me know what you think! -Pieter

    Apr 2026 · vibej.am · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →