Back in the 1980s when text adventure games were popular I was thinking of writing a game so I started by writing a compiler for my own game language. I never completed the game and I probably had more fun developing the language than the game. This was also the time when OOP was becoming fashionable and my language allowed me to experiment with class and prototype OOP, multiple inheritance etc. so it was definitely a useful experience.
Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
61–70 of 247 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#62I made a toy language called Cowbel to experiment with various language minimalism features: http://cowlark.com/cowbel/example.html It's an attempt to take as many features as possible out of a language and still have an expressive Javascript-like language. It worked pretty well, but of course, actually producing the compiler is the easiest part of any new programming language. Features include: - all types are anony…
Oh, yeah, a very early prototype of this language compiled into Gnu Make. I ended up writing quite a lot of an arbitrary precision maths library in Make. I... have no idea what I was thinking.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#631. In 2007 started Cython (http://cython.org/). We were using Pyrex (by Greg Ewing) for Sage (http://sagemath.org), and kept having to add new support and features. Pyrex was amazing, but Greg seemed to work on it once a year (?) by himself, with no revision control, and his view for the direction of Pyrex was somewhat limited. We needed something that could compile "99.9%" of Python, e.g., including list comprehensions, nested functions (closures), etc. I had added a bunch of things to Pyrex (in a fork), and a student of mine -- Robert Bradshaw (now at Google) -- had added a lot more. So I made up a good name ("Cython", for which the only Google search was a picture of a guy with a mohawk flipping the bird), made a nice website, and asked each of Robert or Stefan Behnel to be the lead developer. Both said, "NO", so I made them both co-lead developers, and amazingly that worked :-). A huge amount happened with Cython since then (many new devs, a book, etc.), with Cython now being very popular for writing fast compiled extension to Python for scientific computing applications. Happily I have done almost no further work on the Cython compiler, which is not the sort of work I like doing (that's why Sage uses Python, unlike almost every other math software package).
2. I wrote the Sage preparser, which adds a bunch of math-friendly syntax/language extensions to Python, in order to make it more suitable for interactive use for math. I realized this was needed while giving an early demo of Sage at PyCon in 2005. Otherwise, users of the competitor products to Sage would be much less likely to consider switching. This seems to have worked pretty well, and fortunately I think we haven't added anything to the preparser in years.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#64I made a language for doing 2-adic arithmetic easily and exploring the Collatz 3n+1 problem.
I am not aware of any languages with 2-adic number primitives, so created one!
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#65I (with some colleagues) developed a capability-based shell scripting language (http://shill-lang.org) that makes it easier to apply the Principle of Least Privilege to system administration tasks and also functions as a modular, programmable sandbox.
We're currently working on a port to Linux and a commercial version. If you're intrigued, I'd love to chat.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#66Our CTO and my co-founder at CryptoMove (also, my dad) created the Hello distributed programming language recently.
From the white paper, some of the problems Hello aims to solve are (1) Repeated re-coding of the same distributed primitives; (2) Challenging development process due to the combination of a programming language and extraneous library; and (3) Inefficient and unreliable distributed code.
Here is the white paper and reference guide if anybody is curious:
White Paper: https://docsend.com/view/zfcz7sh Reference Guide: https://docsend.com/view/65tbeht
Edit: Thank you omg.lame.dont.dotis@wtf.example.com (email edited) for the feedback. We have email capture by default because we use DocSend for sales collateral, but we've turned it off for these white papers. They're downloadable too, if you just want the PDFs.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#67In the early 90s I created a small custom language. The purpose was to learn/build a compiler though, but other projects came along so it was eventually scrapped. I did get fruits from it though in terms of how compilers work.
I also came up with an idea to build a common intermediate compiler so you could use C/C++, asm, BASIC, custom language etc. on top, then a descriptor/translator file would compile to a common assembler base. This was on the Amiga (and some years before .Net).
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-Turing complete languages are useful, but it has been my impression that it is difficult to be powerful enough to be useful without being (accidentally!) Turing complete.
As a Computer Scientist, I actually find the distinction Turing and non-Turing to be rather obscure. Perhaps I am in the ignorant minority on this.
Isn't it just possessing both conditionals and loops?
Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-Turing complete languages are useful, but it has been my impression that it is difficult to be powerful enough to be useful without being (accidentally!) Turing complete.
As a Computer Scientist, I actually find the distinction Turing and non-Turing to be rather obscure. Perhaps I am in the ignorant minority on this.
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Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?
#70I 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…
One academic also did make in Prolog. That way it was ddclarative and used logic programming.