Gleam is a language for which I see a lot of articles, with some interest, and it doesn’t appear to be mostly self-posts and releases. Tagging it as Erlang is inappropriate, as it’s not Erlang. It gets posted about enough it deserves to be something filterable, in the past 3 months we’ve had:
- https://lobste.rs/s/k3s6cs/gleam_is_pragmatic
- https://lobste.rs/s/voqebm/designing_gleam_s_web_framework
- https://lobste.rs/s/9nyxpo/convenient_code_actions_gleam_v1_5
- https://lobste.rs/s/kxqlwz/my_first_experience_with_gleam_language
- https://lobste.rs/s/3boto7/first_impressions_gleam_lots_joys_some
- https://lobste.rs/s/yanrtu/supercharged_labels_gleam_v1_4_0
- https://lobste.rs/s/kolbyk/new_gleam_feature_i_love
- https://lobste.rs/s/qqyfjh/enhancing_your_elixir_codebase_with
- https://lobste.rs/s/8ufrdw/auto_imports_tolerant_expressions_gleam
- https://lobste.rs/s/mmje1n/using_use_gleam
Have any of these recent tag requests resulted in a tag being added? I can’t think of the last time I heard about a new tag; it seems to have been years.
We still don’t have tags for e.g. Forth (and concatenative languages) which gets posts pretty often, viz. the one about PostScript this week, and for which a tag has been requested a few times since I’ve been here.
How hard is it to add a new tag anyway?
It’s been a while
https://gerikson.com/blog/comm/Lobsters-tags.html
But I disagree with many of the tag proposals. Does not having a forth tag dissuade people from posting submissions about Forth? They’re clearly on-topic as it’s a question of programming. The only reason for having a forth tag is if there are so many that people want to filter them out. Neither forth nor gleam have reached that stage imho.
There’s been lots of stories I’ve dragged my feet on submitting because we didn’t have a good tag for them. Data science and scientific computing come to mind.
Yeah, that’s more of an issue. Expanding the on-topic set through new tags is harder than subdividing it by adding sub-tags to existing ones, and that’s hard enough apparently.
Still, I’d say
sciencecovers those topics better than most stuff that’s posted with thesciencetag.That shouldn’t be the only criterion. This comment of mine from 2022 lists three additional uses for new tags – that is, reasons to add new tags. That comment also lists all the reasons I can think of that it could be harmful to add a tag.
It’s true that the only benefit of tags called out in the About page’s instructions for proposing a tag is using them to filter stories out:
But other parts of that About page mention the additional purposes for tags that my 2022 comment described.
It’s a bit of a chore, mostly in tagging recent stories.
I try to be pretty conservative adding tags. They’re individually cheap, but if we have hundreds more it weights on submitters and suggesters. The about page lists some things that are useful in suggestions but they’re not always present. I should add some language about what positive reception looks like, too.
In any case, I’ve added the gleam tag with a rough description; please reply if anyone has a better description.
Every new tag means a little more cognitive load whenever anyone submits a story, which if left unchecked would mean tagging is done less accurately and filtering is less consistent. A tag needs to be worth it, I think.
I would say that they add cognitive load in proportion to the number of tags that exist. There is already a large number of tags. Each new tag is like a few percentage extra cognitive overload. I don’t think it’s a huge deal.
Users can suggest tags on submissions, so the tag discovery is kinda distributed.
There should also be a tag for concatenative languages imo, fwiw.
IMO a “forth” tag should apply to them, just as the “lisp” tag applies to all S-expr based homoiconic lambda-calculus languages.
And, of course, the inverse is also true: if people are excited about it, they may want to browse the tag.
Yeah, so people can filter by tag Gleam and see Gleam stories, or filter Gleam out from their homepage.
At the moment the number of tags is just small enough that I can easily choose from the list for my posts. Let’s not spoil that. (This is nothing against Gleam. Very happy to see more Gleam posts.)
I’m also going to echo others here. I think 10 posts over 3 months, average of 1 post per week, wouldn’t warrant a tag of its own. With such standard, there should be hundreds more tags than we currently have.