Little is a statically typed, C-like scripting language

by luckydude • 10 years ago

18 6 10 years ago

isxek3• 10 years ago

While some of us could switch from C to Tcl easily, our pointy-haired boss could not, he's mostly C and would lose about a half a day to get back into Tcl.

He did what every crazy boss does, he funded a programming language.

These bits made me laugh (and feel some small amount of envy). Is it correct to presume they're referring to you here?

luckydude3• 10 years ago

Hi, pointed haired boss here, reporting for duty :)

I get the envy, it is nice being able to fund a language. I feel vaguely guilty like I was scratching my own itch, because that's exactly what was going on. I'll feel less guilty if someone else says "hey, cool, looks like C" and plays with it.

I think if I did it all over again I'd open source it sooner.

isxek3• 10 years ago

The envy is actually directed at your co-workers/employees: they get to work on something that has almost completely no hope of becoming commercial :).

I understand why you did it with your VCS, but with a scripting language? I would have made it open source sooner, too. Then again, as the business owner, there are always other angles that need to be considered.

luckydude3• 10 years ago

We've been using this language internally for a number of years and finally got around to pushing it out the door.

It's unusual because it keeps C's types, so you get compile time type checking (with some run time checks). In particular you get structs which are nicer than the typical scripting language approach of using a hash where you want a struct. The structs tend to be commented, I learn a lot about a program by reading the struct declarations.

It's based on Tcl which might seem a little strange these days, but back in the day we were a self funded startup (18 years later, still no VC money) and there was just no way I could have paid for native guis on all the platforms. So the Tk part of Tcl/Tk was essential. I love what Tk can do, even today. But Tcl syntax drives me crazy unless I'm living in it every day.

Little has been pleasant to use, ctags just work, indent just works (until it hits "if (buf =~ /regexp/)", I think that trips it up because it doesn't know that // is like ""), c mode in editors tend to just work.

If it gains any traction I could imagine that someone tries to make a gcc --little dialect, I'd be all over that idea.

It's been fun developing the language, here's hoping someone has fun using it.

Little is a statically typed, C-like scripting language

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