I created a scripting language for my interactive fiction engine because the existing ones have too many assumptions about gameplay. It's Turing complete with ultra minimalist syntax using punctuation as the few keywords it has.
Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
41–50 of 247 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#42I created a language.
I was refactoring a very complex class at work that was hiding a very unsafe one liner of python doing a «safe» eval that was nowhere near safe. And after 3 days of mine + the 3 weeks from the team that appeared in the git on the work of this class, I thought, well I am told I am an idiot, but I am pretty sure one can make a safe language that only includes what customers need without taking as much time as this disgusting pile of obfuscated unsafe junk.
I did a forth based language in 16 hours on my spare time that was having the minimal requirements that satisfied real use case of all the customers.
Proposed to replace it after showing vulnerabilities.
Then I was shouted at by the CTO because it was undermining is great technical choices.
And then I realized that this Access Provider did not cared about neither their security nor the one of their customers, just about their nice boats and expensive cars and were just milking the internet users like any other ISP.
Creating your own language is dangerous ; it can make you think about too much things, do not do it.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#43I made a little DSL for a program. Soon enough after requests the functions included a ternary function, and some custom functions. And before you knew it it was the bastard child of every bad programming language imaginable.
> and why
I didn't intend to. It just happened. And now it's used for all kinds of things it can't really manage because it doesn't have the fundamentals right - it was just supposed to do some simple formulas and it's too late to design it like a proper language.
This is how both js and php were born I imagine...
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#44I wrote remobjects oxygene (Pascal), c#, swift and iodine (java) for .net Java/android cocoa and native windows and linux. Started about 12 years ago, still going. Originally because I thought it would be fun, ended up being my job.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#45I want to, but I have never done so. Maybe later in my life. 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…
A really cool replacement for make is tup. It's very fast and figures out dependencies by tracking which files get read or written by each command.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#46I'm currently making a programming language that tries not to be a programming language. To give some background: I'm working on a program to allow anyone to create video games. But to add custom functionality, my users need to use some kind of programming/scripting language. Since these are non-technical people, it must be as easy and simple as possible. Therefore I'm now making a language (called Screenplay) where…
How does this compare to Unreal Engine's visual programming language?
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#47Didn't create the language, but had to implement a parser for RELAX NG Compact[0] years ago (in PHP!!).
It was to provide a client the flexibility they "needed" for data validation specifications.
It was a mess. We suggested many alternative routes, but the client insisted on this. We did make the saner decision to go with an already-established markup language.
We couldn't even do the full XML version, as the client didn't want to "do XML".
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#48I'm currently making a programming language that tries not to be a programming language. To give some background: I'm working on a program to allow anyone to create video games. But to add custom functionality, my users need to use some kind of programming/scripting language. Since these are non-technical people, it must be as easy and simple as possible. Therefore I'm now making a language (called Screenplay) where…
This is the same set of design principles that was behind COBOL, as I understand them.
It is probably fine for the purpose of simple gaming scripts.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#49I've created three instances of what I'd consider to be programming languages. The first was something I did in an intro to CS class. I asked the professor if I could use C++ rather than Pascal for the assignment, and was, of course, turned down. I'm not proud to admit to this, but in a fit of pique, I decided to write my own programming language in Pascal than then submit the assignment in that. The result was somet…
> I did get an A, the professor said I should've gotten bonus points, but in retrospect he would've been within his rights to fail me outright
Well, to be fair, in the real world its not too rare for engineers to write custom programming languages to solve their problems (see: this thread). So what you did isn't that far outside of what's really done, assuming you submitted the code for the programming language with the assignment.
That said, I think he would have been within his rights to give you a C for overengineering it :p.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#50I created a non-Turing complete programming language for editing animations, implemented as a GIMP Script-Fu script (Scheme, basically). Here's the documentation: http://tshatrov.github.io/animstack Why? Because in GIMP it's annoying to edit animations with many layers, so I wanted to write a script that would do what I want. But rather than hardcoding a specific action, I wrote it in an extensible way, and the rest…
That they are always terminating is very useful for programs that generate proofs, or otherwise don't have to be evaluated.
But if you can encode the Ackermann function, proof of termination is not very useful in practice - as it may consume arbitrarily large amounts of space and time to evaluate (easily more than the age/size of the universe).