What you learn by making a new programming language

https://ntietz.com/blog/you-should-make-a-new-terrible-programming-language/

by kaycebasques • 2 years ago

235 133 2 years ago

ntietz.com

lallysingh2• 2 years ago

Every program expands until it becomes a compiler or checks mail. Emacs's sin was doing both.

jpgvm• 2 years ago

Angry upvote.

Maybe it's true failing though was stopping short of becoming the OS.

yjftsjthsd-h2• 2 years ago

It's not its own kernel, but emacs can run on Linux as PID 1, at which point it rather seems like it should count as an OS. Given its affiliation, emacs/Linux probably still counts as GNU/Linux, but still...

shortrounddev2• 2 years ago

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

efilife2• 2 years ago

Is this a joke I'm not getting? Any examples of such software?

karmakaze• 2 years ago

It's especially prevalent when expanding configuration capabilities.

bunderbunder2• 2 years ago

In fairness, this is also every modern Web browser's sin.

rzimmerman• 2 years ago

I spent time on a compile-to-JS language and found it very rewarding: https://github.com/rzimmerman/kal

This was before async/generators were added to JS and callback hell was quite real. I wanted to shape it in the way I’d learned to program in Visual Basic. Very human readable. The result is no longer useful, but it was a fun goal to have the compiler compile itself.

pansa2• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234863

JohnMakin2• 2 years ago

One of the most fundamental experiences I ever had was attempting a graduate level course at the end of a long series on compilers. You really get an eye opening view of how languages are translated into the language the machine understands. After going through a few toy languages and then finally tackling creating a simple JVM, here is the #1 thing I would go back to myself and scream until I was blue -

Make your initial grammar SUPER simple. Like, don't go guns blazing and try to add all these cool features you saw in another language or always thought about. Start stupid, stupid simple, get that working, then build on top of it.

lioeters• 2 years ago

This is why the Lisp syntax is a great candidate for an exercise in making your own language. For example, Make a Lisp. https://github.com/kanaka/mal

It's simple to lex and parse into an abstract syntax tree, so you can get on with exploring more interesting aspects of programming beyond the mere syntax. (Not to say that there aren't interesting aspects of grammar and innovative syntax, but those can probably be explored later on as macros.)

Last time I created a toy language, I implemented a C-like infix syntax but still used a Lisp evaluator at its core from a previous project.

JohnMakin2• 2 years ago

It's simple to lex and parse into an abstract syntax tree,

There are some "cheats" for this, tools like ANTLR etc. that are good at generating parsers from a particular grammar. But of course, I think a beginner should try to do this on their own to get a feel for it.

Personally, for me, I do find writing parsers a little tedious and not the most fun part of making a language.

whartung2• 2 years ago

For many simple languages, the most complex construct is the expression.

Lots of things come to light there. Lots of recursion/fun with stacks, operator precedence, the type system, parameter passing. Pretty much a good solid chunk of language is wrapped up in expressions.

Get expressions working, and the rest starts to readily fall into place.

Hunpeter• 2 years ago

I've been working on a toy compiler on-and-off, which is basically just a "reinvent-the-wheel simulator" since I really haven't looked at much existing literature. A very janky, bug-prone part of it is a sort-of mini parser generator, which you can feed a dictionary of rules (as strings) to. This, while slowing down the compilation speed, has allowed me to expand the grammar incrementally from dead simple to more complex, which has been a nice thing.

hoosieree• 2 years ago

Building an interpreter for myself, can confirm. Saying "no" to feature requests is especially hard because I'm the one requesting them!

maxbond3• 2 years ago

Make your initial grammar SUPER simple.

I would go further and say don't write a parser at first, unless what's novel and interesting about your language is it's syntax. Use the configuration language of your choice (like TOML or YAML) to write your ASTs directly, so you can focus on writing the runtime/backend and playing with the semantics of your language (where the novelty probably is).

When you feel it's the appropriate time, you can circle back to the frontend and implement a parser. But if you're writing a DSL, a config language may well be good enough. An additional bonus is that your config language syntax will make it easier to write certain unit tests.

I've had several experiments in writing a new language, and the first few times I got completely bogged down in parsing. I learned a lot about parsing, which is great, but it made it difficult for me to get at the meat of a project.

systemBuilder2• 2 years ago

The difficulty in learning a language is proportional to the SQUARE of the number of BNF rules! Let that sink in. When last I looked, C had 120 rules and C++ had 250. C++ was already out of control and has a bunch of really stupid features that nobody with any intelligence uses for anything other than showing off (and let me tell you - there are A LOT of showoffs at Google!) Anyway, that's why C++ is 4x harder to learn than C ... I call it ... "Don's Law".

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

No. No, I really shouldn't.

Yes, I might gain a better understanding of how things work. I can do that lots of ways; others may be a better use of my limited time. (For that matter, doing other things that don't give me a better understanding of how things work may be a better, more valuable use of my limited time.)

Yes, I could get a language that fits what I need better... in theory. In practice, it would be buggy, inconsistent, and incompletely implemented. It would not actually fit what I need better than existing languages.

pc86• 2 years ago

How is using a language that is buggy, inconsistent, and incomplete any better than use a better language to write an app that is buggy, inconsistent, and incomplete?

Checkmate.

jbs789• 2 years ago

Umm if we are looking for analogies. I would prefer a castle built on rock rather than one built on sand.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

Yes, my apps are buggy, inconsistent, and incomplete (as are all apps). But they're less bad than my language would be, because they're my day job, and my language wouldn't be.

So, not checkmate at all.

anta40• 2 years ago

Different context, though. I'm pretty sure that my Java/Go/Kotlin apps are buggy. So what, bugs are always exist. Just fix them. But as a language user, it's not my job to fix compiler/RTL library bugs. Write a bug report on GitHub, instead.

But when you are designing a programming language and writing the interpreter/compiler, well you are on your own :D

kemitche• 2 years ago

The article doesn't claim that you should make a language and actually use it - the author focuses on the learning experience. He makes valid points.

No, it's probably not the right learning experience for everyone (clearly, it won't be yours), but there's definitely value in it for some people. And if reading the article nudges a few more people to take that learning dive, I think that's a good thing.

whartung2• 2 years ago

You should write a language for the same reason you should write a game.

It's not hard for a game to touch all sorts of corners of the computer world that routine work will never come near. Games are great because they're easy to focus on, you know pretty much precisely what you want it to do. They also tend to be made of small parts, yet extensible, in terms of adding features if you still have wind in your sails.

And if not, hey, you have a few more data structures under your belt. Who knows when those may come in handy again.

Languages are similar. Get past a few "hard parts" and they can be a fun ride.

For extra fun, put the language into your game. Dog food for everyone.

ted_dunning• 2 years ago

Having written several toy languages, I think that the process is supremely educational in ways that other efforts are not. In particular, it gives you an awareness of how these things can go wrong so that you can see where your day job efforts can go wrong if extended too far in some direction. You always learn about distinctions that were never apparent before you got into the details.

Without the freedom to make a mess of things, you live too cautious a life. It's worth digging in to some of these efforts even if they do wind up a mess. It's not because the mess will be meaningful. It's because you will understand better what was good and bad about what you did and how you got there.

napierzaza• 2 years ago

I remember when I was making music. It was really fun and engaging. Then I learned about microcontroller projects for making my own synthesizer. It was fun and it took me two years to build my synth. At the end of it I had not made music for long enough to have lost the knack, and I was sick of even learning how to use the synth because I was worried I would have to debug it. So I just didn't make music ever again. Why consume yourself with some sub project that goes nowhere?

tombert2• 2 years ago

I've had two projects that end up being "oops, I made an interpreter".

It starts innocently enough, you just have a JSON that has some basic functionality. Then you decide it would be cool to nest functionality because there's no reason not to, so you build a recursive parser. Then you think it'd be neat to be able to add some arguments to the recursive stuff, because then you can more easily parameterize the JSON. Then you realize it might be nice to assign names to these things as you call them, you implement that, and now you're treating JSON as an AST and you're stuck with maintaining an interpreter, and life is pain.

gavinhoward2• 2 years ago

See also the Configuration Complexity Clock: https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-comple... .

This is why I have a separate config language and code language.

My config language is essentially JSON with newline separators and a first-class binary type (base64). I added little else.

When I get the temptation to add code to it, I just pull out my other, general-purpose language instead.

aapoalas• 2 years ago

I'm basically in charge of maintaining and developing a product that (on purpose) started at 9 o'clock. We've resisted the call to implement loops and such in our DSL but I can hear the wolves howling and I doubt I have much longer...

jolt42• 2 years ago

Personally I've seen 9pm be a holy grail, an exceedingly advantageous position to be in. But, it's exceedingly challenging to figure out what that DSL should and should not have as well.

sjducb• 2 years ago

and life is pain

So glad you finished with this. Right now I’m working with a guy who wants to write an interpreter…

prisenco• 2 years ago

Writing an interpreter for a project that isn't explicitly an interpreter is a code smell equivalent to microwaving fish.

It is an incredibly fun side project though.

diggan• 2 years ago

Right now I’m working with a guy who wants to write an interpreter…

Stuff like that works out great if you have a static set of features that will never change and you can at one point say "it's done", and won't have to touch it again.

Problem is that features are almost never static across their lifetime, and some poor sucker has to modify it at one point.

__s• 2 years ago

Skip straight to Lua

anonymoushn• 2 years ago

I'm pretty happy with "json scripting" for an implementation[0] of card game[1] with relatively low rules complexity. For a time it could evaluate arithmetic expressions, but I got rid of that because it was a bit unwieldy. The main pain point is that it runs slower than I'd like, so I may end up porting it all to actual Javascript functions or to Zig.

[0] https://github.com/sharpobject/yisim/blob/master/swogi.json

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1948800/Yi_Xian_The_Culti...

tombert2• 2 years ago

The first time I did this, I ended up writing stuff that could use replace strings with regular expressions, do arithmetic, string concatenation, and a few other things. It was honestly kind of cool but it was horrible to maintain and I wish I had just kept the JSON as data.

axegon_• 2 years ago

Likewise, I've done that more times than I'd like to admit. And I took it a step further with an LLM like a month and a half ago fenced behind a number of json and yaml instructions, containing conditions and validators. It works like a charm but yeah... Oops, I did it again.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Oops, I did it again

I played with `eval`, got lost in codegen: O(AB), maybe?

CyberDildonics2• 2 years ago

Lots of people learn the same lesson at some price.

Data and execution are two separate things and should remain as separate as possible.

The reason is that once you mix data and execution, suddenly you don't know what your data is until you execute it. Then you can only deal with it in the context of whatever tools you write and you can never just look at it straight.

On the other hand now execution depends on lots of data and is no longer modular or general/generic and so becomes a one off solution somewhere.

At some point everyone has the "what if" idea and hopefully it only burns them instead of lots of other people through poor design.

renox• 2 years ago

Nice theory, how do you do in the real world where you have a 'data' whose value depends on the OS used?

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

This happened to me with an XML based rules engine I wrote. First I needed conditions, then I introduced variables, then loops, then if-then-else. When I needed to handle errors, I realized that I just had invented something like BASIC in XML format. The interpreter was surprisingly short and concise mainly because XML ensured I didn't have to do the parsing.

Switched to dynamically compiled C# eventually.

cvoss2• 2 years ago

I've dreamed about making my own language for about 10 years or so. Started out just messing around. My vision for what it would be and its purpose has changed over time. About 2 years ago, I "got serious" about designing and implementing it, though that doesn't mean I've spent a serious amount of time on it yet. But it's happening!

It's a language for the domain of writing and verifying formal proofs. Basically, I didn't enjoy the experience of working with the couple of proof assistants I tried, so I'm doing my own thing. My objective is to create a language where I can document "everything I know" about math, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I know those things, and to return to that knowledge if it ever slips away.

It's so much fun!

alexwashere_• 2 years ago

Sounds neat - got any example code you could share?

cvoss2• 2 years ago

Not ready to do that yet. But I hope so one day!

PodgieTar• 2 years ago

I made a little toy compiler for a university project many years back, and I agree with the article - it's quite a nice way to get hands on with syntax and helps you think a bit more deeply about what is actually happening.

https://github.com/Podginator/Rattle/tree/master

It used JavaCC, which I found to be a pretty simple way to get up and running.

I also worked a job that used yacc to create their own DSL for a piece of software. Same thing, really. Easy enough to get up and running, and messing around with.

elashri• 2 years ago

It is always my dream to write an interpreter for my imaginary language that does provide a more human readable syntax to write scripts. It is basically language that compiles to bash because it is everywhere but I really hate writing bash although I write bash/zsh code a lot.

Yes I can use python (other scripting language for that) but this is not cool as writing your own programming language and also you don't always have access to python environment. Bash just runs everywhere (at least for me). It is also my motivation to learn about compilers and how they work.

morning-coffee• 2 years ago

The timing of this article is great for me as lately I'm fascinated by the Forth language and the simplicity behind its apparent strangeness. I've been tempted to start playing with similar ideas just for fun.

(https://ratfactor.com/forth/the_programming_language_that_wr... is a great read, btw.)

graypegg• 2 years ago

I think maybe a good middle ground is write an interpreter for an already spec'd esoteric language like brainfuck. [0]

It's really fun. Brainfuck specifically is great because there's a lot to optimize with only 6 total operations. (An example, multiplication has to be done as repeated addition in a loop, make a multiply AST node! [1]) and you could knock out a (BF => AST => Anything you want) compiler in an afternoon!

Bonus, there's a lot of really impressive brainfuck scripts out there. Nothing compares to seeing your compiler take in some non-sense ascii, and spit out an application that draws the mandlebrot fractal.

[0] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck

[1] https://github.com/graypegg/unfuck/blob/master/src/optimiser...

mckn1ght• 2 years ago

Similarly, I’ve been thinking lately about forking Swift, because there’s a lot I love about the language, but also a lot of, IMO, unnecessary sugar and redundant surface area.

kstenerud• 2 years ago

I haven't made a programming language (and never will), but I did build a BNF-inspired metalanguage for describing text and binary formats to scratch the itch of trying to describe a binary data format I was developing:

The metalanguage: https://dogma-lang.org/

It's even got a syntax highlighter: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ksteneru...

The binary format I wanted to describe: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

zX41ZdbW• 2 years ago

It will be good to add "Programming Language Checklist" to the references: https://www.mcmillen.dev/language_checklist.html

looneysquash• 2 years ago

Are there some good resources for learning type theory?

throwaway17_17• 2 years ago

I would suggest Robert Harper's "Practical Foundations for Programming Language". [1] This take a relatively thorough approach to the development of language semantics, with particular emphasis on Type Theory. Addition work on Type Theory is scattered throughout academic work, but Harper is good place to start. The implementation of 'normal' type systems in mainstream languages are for the most part just semi-performant straight forward instances of the more formal algorithms presented in the literature. Searching for lectures by Neel Krishnaswami on YouTube will yield some decent results on developing Type Systems as well.

1 - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl.html

Jeaye2• 2 years ago

Anyone wanting to work on a new language is most welcome to help out on mine: jank. It's a native Clojure dialect on LLVM with C++ interop and all the JIT goodies one expects from a lisp.

jank is currently part of a mentorship program, too, so you can join (for sree) and get mentored by me on C++, compiler dev, and Clojure runtime internals.

1. https://jank-lang.org/ 2. https://clojureverse.org/t/announcing-the-scicloj-open-sourc...

aeonik2• 2 years ago

Were you able to implement transducers at the core of Jank? Or did you end up sticking to the existing Java implementation as much as possible?

Jeaye2• 2 years ago

Transducers, in Clojure, are implemented in Clojure, rather than in Java. In jank, the Clojure source for transducers is exactly the same. For example: https://github.com/jank-lang/jank/blob/a14f4d7c7e8097d5ab588...

pclmulqdq• 2 years ago

One project I started recently was a dice rolling discord bot. Halfway into it, I realized that I really wanted an AST for dice roll expressions to avoid a whole bunch of bugs and special cases, so that project is now mainly a compiler.

More seriously, I have been very tempted recently to make a programming language specifically for cryptography, but I am holding off until I can no longer stand assembly.

norir• 2 years ago

I think many people underestimate how easy it is to get started writing a language. It is a bit like improvising music: it's just one note followed by another note followed by another. Almost any intermediate level programmer can write a program that parses a hello, world program and translates it into the language they already know. Once you have hello, world, you add features. Eventually you realize you made mistakes in your initial design and start over but your second design will be better than the first because of the knowledge that you now have. After enough iterations, you will have a good language that you like (even though it won't be everyone's cup of tea).

codr72• 2 years ago

Yeah, the high stakes are part of the thrill, because it's oh so easy to paint yourself into enough of a corner to have to throw the whole thing away and start over.

sixthDot• 2 years ago

Very true. Working on a proglang is more like running a marathon than a 100 meters. Another thing that would surprise people is that how few complex data structures or subtil algorithms are required. For example in styx-lang, my little retard baby language, there is literaly no binary searches, no sorting, no hash map, no hash sets, yet it is still fast because actually a compiler most of the time only has to deal with very small vectors (5 parameters, 10 enum members, 15 statements in a body, etc.)

allanren• 2 years ago

Seems the future of programming language is natural language

itishappy• 2 years ago

Good news, you can make new natural languages too!

maxbond3• 2 years ago

Well, it would be a constructed language if you did it intentionally, but your point stands in that you can make a new language.

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

In woodworking you make tools all the time, namely jigs. So much of woodworking, whether it is making cabinets, musical instruments, art, or whatever involves making your jigs, templates, and a bunch of other stuff. Hell, even larger projects like complex workbenches.

You rarely make actual tools, though. It's unheard of that a woodworking goes on to make their own router, band saw, planer, jointer, chisels, etc. - but you can learn a ton by starting with the absolute bare basics, before investing a ton in expensive tools.

Kind of makes me wonder where this analogy fits (if at all) in the world of software engineering: Some tools are probably either too complex, or don't really make sense making, if you're going to use it to actually build something.

I mean, it is a good intellectual exercised for the curious, and you pick up a bunch of things underway, but at some point it is probably good to ask yourself if your time is better spent on something else.

news_to_me• 2 years ago

This is so true. I feel like I've learned more about programming in the last two years making Cassette[1] than in the past decade of professional software development.

Every developer should make a language at some point. I want to see everyone's weird, half-baked languages! I want to hear about what other people struggled with, and the tradeoffs they've made!

[1] https://cassette-lang.com

giancarlostoro2• 2 years ago

This looks neat. I tried VB.NET a few weeks ago, and felt like it was mostly pointless since almost all resources are done in C# and so you have to translate from C# to VB.NET anytime you want to do anything, which can be a bit of a pain.

But one thing I really liked was the "begin end" type of code blocks.

DeborahWrites• 2 years ago

Every ~3yrs an article like this floats across my screen.

Every time, I think it sounds SO fun.

And then do nothing.

Given this time I have the excellent excuse of a new job, I don't expect to break the trend this year.

But one day . . . one day . . .

bsnnkv• 2 years ago

My version of this was building my own tiling window manager (I also ended up building my own hotkey daemon with its own syntax and parser along the way)

Doches• 2 years ago

It's special that we make our own tools

I've always taken this to heart, but not necessarily with programming languages. Any piece of software that helps run my business that I can reasonably make and maintain myself, I do. I build my own CI/CD app, orchestration/deployment tool, task planner, bug tracker, release note editing & publishing tools, blog editor, logstash/viewer for exceptions, etc.

Does building (and especially maintaining!) all of these tools take up a lot of time, and distract me from the primary business of building the software that I actually sell? Sure, of course it does. But it also keeps me fresh and forces me to expand the scope of ideas that I regularly work with, and keeps me from becoming "that guy who makes that one app" and who isn't capable of moving outside of his comfort zone.

And while that doesn't (yet) extend to building my own tools in my own languages, it certainly does extend to writing my own DSLs for things like configuration management or infrastructure. My tools may be homerolled and second-rate, but they're mine (dammit!) and -- this part is important -- no one can take them away from me or catch me out with a licensing rug-pull.

cardiffspaceman• 2 years ago

Landin wrote a paper called, "The next seven hundred programming languages."[1] The paper predicts quite a bit of the present. So I named my programming language, DCC.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf

atum47• 2 years ago

Long time ago I was stuck at the airport and I end up writing a interpreter in Python. I stop the project at arithmetic, so, basically a fancy calculator. After that I saw a really interesting video about Shunting Yard algorithm, so I gave that a got as well [1]. At some point, I want to try to write a programming language, I know a little bit about assembly but it is most theory; haven't done much programming using it (only basic stuff, back in college) but I find it fascinating.

1 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/shuntingYard

mjhay2• 2 years ago

It will be a bad language, and that's okay

This same advice could be applied to most hobbies. It doesn't have to be good, and it certainly doesn't have to make money. It just has to be fun and rewarding. If you learn something, even better.

Go Forth, make something fun

*golfclap*

stevekemp• 2 years ago

And here's my tutorial FORTH, based upon a thread from hacker news:

https://github.com/skx/foth

Forth is always appealing, whether literally, or in puns.

mjhay2• 2 years ago

Very cool, I'll check it out. I've been meaning to give Go a spin.

loscoala• 2 years ago

I also came across FORTH through hacker news. I ended up developing a compiler that can translate FORTH into C.

For the interested reader:

https://github.com/loscoala/goforth

It was a great experience and I can only recommend trying to develop a programming language yourself.

IWeldMelons• 2 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/ is a treasure trove for those who wants to engage in the quest.

flobosg• 2 years ago

“Beautiful Racket” comes to mind: https://beautifulracket.com/

tunesmith• 2 years ago

I've had a pet idea for a long time that is nonsensical but I still wish existed. I'd like a programming language that encodes the "why", like forces you to compile in the business reason for the code in question. And then it'd automatically survey you, and if your prior business assumptions are no long true, then compilation would fail, forcing you to remove or rewrite until the code fits your "why" again.

kabdib• 2 years ago

Write the debugger first. Or at least, very early.

You're going to need one anyway . . .

danielvaughn• 2 years ago

Last year I tried to build a language and I wholeheartedly agree - it's amazing how much it teaches you. My particular language was merely meant to be transpiled to other languages, so I didn't get into the runtime or compilation stuff. But I quickly learned why braces and ignoring whitespace is so important. I also had to think extremely hard and carefully about the exact syntax and what each token meant. It's a very rewarding intellectual activity.

One thing I'd like to add is that even though you can totally write your own parser, it's an absolute joy to use Tree-sitter:

https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter

I plug it every time I get a chance. It makes refactoring your grammar incredibly easy, and lets you just focus on your syntax.

liamilan• 2 years ago

I built Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb) a year ago, before starting university. It completely changed the way I conceptualized programming as a whole. You start feeling deja-vu every time you open a new language, and the "ah-ha!" feeling you get when you see something in another language you had to think about when implementing your own is super rewarding.

A year later (this summer) I used Crumb to land my first job at a pretty cool startup! The payoff was way more than I could have ever expected.

codr72• 2 years ago

Highly recommended! And I do mean new. Because having an opinion is good, and validating it is even better. I find it to be mostly educational, humbling and fulfilling; but occasionally VERY frustrating because there's just no end of things to fix and improve.

https://github.com/codr7/sharpl

giancarlostoro2• 2 years ago

Nice, I really want to see a Clojure equivalent on .NET where its a Lisp language, but it fits in with its ecosystem.

neonsunset• 2 years ago

There is https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr

(I cannot testify for usability, the project is alive but it seems to need more contributors to really get going)

Lerc2• 2 years ago

I still hope to make one, but a combination of ADHD, depression and so many things to do and learn keep getting in the way.

At my current rate I'll know everything and be ready to get started on the day I die.

But my feature wishlist is

First class functions, Garbage collection, Transparent parallelism, Explicit parallelism, Type inference with strong type consistency, Dynamicly typed by annotation, Operator overloading (every language should either have vector/matrix operators or the ability to build them)

And a few more that I can't recall just now. I've made it hard for myself.

Failing that maybe just a hacked JavaScript without implicit type conversion between objects/strings etc. (the source of most "Wat?"), frozen array tuples, operator overloading. Implied "this." on identifiers defined and used inside class definitions.

CleanRoomClub• 2 years ago

As someone with similar mental health barriers, what strategies do you employ to overcome them?

Lerc2• 2 years ago

I have not overcome them. Currently on dexamphetamine, my partner has noticed an improvement, me less so. Have been productive for the last week or two so making the most of it.

List making, planning, routines, and pretty much anything that follows someone saying "You just need to ..." Doesn't work for me, or for any of the other ADHD sufferers I know of.

mikewarot• 2 years ago

Making a whole new software/hardware ecosystem is what happens if you keep going... behold... the BitGrid.

Turing Complete, Actually performant, and possibly crazy enough to work

[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

[2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

And my latest attempt at things, because Pascal isn't popular enough, includes C and a Web emulator

[3] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid_C

lifeisstillgood• 2 years ago

I just realised I went down the rabbit hole yesterday. I needed to track work to be done on my work project - so I started writing Todos. And then grepped them, and started extracting things from the todos - like a dotted name (foo.component.feature) and now I have realised it’s a DSL and I should have used lexx not regexes and … it’s a good idea through !

systemBuilder2• 2 years ago

When I was in high school I learned about BNF and so i wrote a program that let you type in BNF rules and then it would run a recognizer on an arbitrary string to decide if the string met the BNF rules. I don't know if I could write that again, but it was a definite eye-opener and I learned a ton from that project ...

martyalain• 2 years ago

I learned that all programming languages come from the lambda calcul, created in the 30s, ten years before the computer era, a simple text rewriting machine using nothing but 2 operators, abstraction and application, working on a sea of words. Something like the Yin and Yang of TAO. More in http://lambdaway.fr .

bitbasher• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about programming languages a bit and I agree. I was looking at Odin and some other languages.

I find it fascinating a language can be purpose-built, like Odin. It's a language that was built for game development. It got me thinking what a language built for web development may look like.

It also got me thinking, we have 'game engines' which are tools built around the same idea. Why don't we have web-CRUD engines? Sure we have frameworks, but we don't have entire purpose built applications for building fullstack applications.

Moon_Y2• 2 years ago

Similar to woodworkers making their own tools, as programmers, we have the ability to create everything from operating systems to tools. This privilege is rare in other fields, allowing us to get closer to the tools we use. This autonomy enables us to have a deeper understanding and mastery of the tools and technologies we rely on.

0x70run• 2 years ago

Are you a summary bot?

Moon_Y2• 2 years ago

I just feel like this analogy is quite fitting.

What you learn by making a new programming language

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