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

I created http://jogolang.org, mostly because I was interested in learning how compilers worked. I was also motivated by the lack of simple, type-safe, ahead-of-time-compiled programming languages for writing video games. Now the project is kind of dead, but I certainly learned a lot about parsers, code generation, optimizations, SSA, and register allocation!

When I was in college, I was addicted to Starcraft II. Luckily, I primarily played 4v4s so the brainpower necessary to win wasn't nearly as high as 1v1s (which left far less room to meme, so I didn't enjoy them nearly as much).

However, while playing game after game in the evenings, I was always frustrated that I was using the inputs and outputs of my body so inefficiently. Starcraft tied up my eyes and my hands, but I still had time to think about the things I'd be coding if I weren't playing, and wished wholeheartedly that I had a few extra hands so I could play AND code at the same time.

This frustration crept into other activities like the drive to and from classes (and, even more frustratingly so, the long drive to and from home when I visited) and I eventually came up with a plan to let me code while multitasking with things that require my hands (primarily starcraft and driving).

I had taken the traditional compilers class the previous year so I had some experience with lexing and grammars, and set out to make my own voice-first programming language. I called it Bespoke (ha) and uploaded a proof of concept to GitHub[1][2] after it was featureful enough to solve a couple Project Euler problems.

I decided to use Javascript in the beginning so I could take advantage of webkit's native speech to text and get right into the logic without having to deal with processing sound or extracting words from it. After getting a proof of concept up, I expanded the flow control and data structures it supported (piggybacking on JS) and eventually wrote some fun (albeit simple) programs while gaming, but eventually gave up on the project when I realized I could code things up in a similar amount of time by just outlining code structure while gaming (also using STT) and coding up the necessary snippets in brief downtimes (between games, at stoplights, etc).

Now, I still pretty much do the same: I use a prose-like DSL that's evolved over the years to outline what to code, in what order, and how to tie it in to other pieces. I now take the train/bus instead of driving (and code at will), and outline what to code while I'm dead in Dota 2 games.

[1] https://github.com/drusepth/voice2code/blob/master/voice2cod... [2] https://gist.github.com/drusepth/3134188

I created the Bloomberg Equity Screening (EQS) query language. It was mostly backward compatible with a previous generation, but added a lot of new things like chained conditionals (Python has these, most languages do not). It is meant to be familiar to users of the Excel formula language.

Most users do not want to write their queries by hand, so I also built round tripping of the language to/from a GUI query builder. You can build a query graphically, edit it as text, then go back to the graphical form. Certain things cannot be displayed however, and generating good error messages was very difficult.

A weird fact is that the backend which evaluates the queries has a totally different language of its own, so there is a transpiler for that.

Thousands of people have used this language, but 99% of them did not know it.

I created https://github.com/onnlucky/hotel for a few different reasons.

1) I wanted to see how far you can go by making every language concept first class, because only first class things can be an abstractions.

2) But another big motivation was that languages usually grow towards building large systems in. I wanted every tradeoff to go to the human side, making it more suitable for beginners. For example, 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3, slower by not using native floating point numbers, but much more humane. Similar motivation to remove the import statements. Or no difference between object fields or methods, e.g. string.length is the same as string.length().

Nope, but have always loved playing around with compilers for languages like PL/0, Pascal (subset) and such. I have many books on compiler design[0] but my itch is usually scratched by implementing a subset of a Wirth language as opposed to creating my own. I don't keep anything I write because it's fun to do it all over again later.

[0] I think my oldest is "Compiler Construction for Digital Computers" by David Gries. My favorite isn't really a compiler book, it's Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" because he implements PL/0. I used to have some PDFs by Thomas Christopher that used matrices to computer first, follow, etc sets that I thought was interesting, but have since lost those.