Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

We were going for a matlab like language but R and Octave weren't deemed ready. For those of you who are already objecting in your head, I'll grant you that I'm not sure we made a good choice here but this was the early 2000s:(

What we were after was a vectorized language that would let you write your quant formulas without having to write loops.

For instance, if you wanted to run say Black Scholes over multiple expiry dates and multiple underlying prices you could pass in a vector of dates and vector of strikes to your model and it would return a grid of results for the permutations of values.

Since this is pretty processor intensive we also had language features for splitting your calculations over multiple machines in your datacenter.

All of this has since been comoditized, but when we started most of this wasn't present.

The company ended up being the calculation engine for calculating risk metrics like VaR for several large banks being acquired by a large financial company, so in that sense it was a success.

The downside of writing our own language was that quants weren't thrilled about having to learn a new language that wasn't a really transferable skill as quants tend to move around from company to company alot.

So the fact that we wrote a language ended up being a barrier to adoption. it also meant that we did a lot of consulting with the banks to get the initial modesl setup, which was good for providing income, but bad in the sense that our good quants soon became our clients good quants.

I have 2 ideas.

the first comes from the difficulty of using make. I think the make system lacks debuggability, it's not easy to log, break, step through and watch locals.

I feel that building should be handled by a domain specific language, instead of make.

I haven't researched enough though, there may be something similar, only it is not popular yet.

the second ideas comes from the difficulty of documentation.

I'm thinking of a programming language that allows you to describe the block diagram (modules) of your program easily. You need to specify what the interfaces are, how many threads ....

then a diagram can be automatically generated as a document. you then fill the internals of your module, with classes. The idea is always forcing programmers to describe design first, then implement. code and document are mixed, so the document is always up-to-date.

  * cmake
  * premake
  * ant
  * scons
  * ninja
  * gyp
  * jam
  * gn (Google)
  * meson

Your second idea is basically UML and some of the tools that exist for it.