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

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

#91

Post by howerj »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #40

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 Grie…

I've just started writing my own PL/0 compiler, I found the best resource for it (apart from the Wikipedia articles on EBNF, PL/0 and P-Code) is Wirth's book "Compiler Construction" (http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf). I don't think later versions of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" contains anything about PL/0 (or a I could not find anything in the contents page). Eitherway, I find Wirth's writing amazingly clear.

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

#92

Post by leafo »

I created a language called MoonScript in 2011

It is heavily inspired by CoffeeScript (and Python), it works as a transpiler for Lua. I've since used it regularly to code dozens of projects.

It's now powering my company along with a handful of websites and supporting libraries. I've also made games and GUI apps with it. The adoption has been pretty minimal, but I'm satisfied regardless. It has definitely improved my productivity.

http://moonscript.org https://github.com/leafo/moonscript

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

#93

Post by antjanus »

I created a spec called MOML and is a markdown-friendly alternative to YAML. It uses plain markdown but allows you to section off parts of the markdown file in order to organize data in a sensible fashion. It has support for arrays so far it only has support for 3 data types: small text, text, and array (of small text or text).

I'm slowly adding features to it like typing, object nesting, etc.

I created it for easier blogging. I'm not a fan of YAML because it's indent-based and I wanted to have a markdown file that hosts all the information about a post on it from the date, to snippet, to main text, title, metadata, hell even a sidebar ad, and author, etc.

I did end up creating a parser for it that I couple with a blogging engine.

The current compiler transforms the MOML file into a JS object

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

#94

Post by woah »

ozy wrote: post #38

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…

Do you really think that those things make it easier? It seems like when languages do these kind of "beginner friendly" features, they just end up as gotchas and quirks. (Like in JS or SQL)

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

#95

Post by omegaham »

sgt101 wrote: post #68
sova wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One more thing - memory.

A Turing Machine is literally just a tape, a movable reader/writer, and a bunch of states that dictate what the reader/writer does.

As long as you have memory, the ability to write to memory, conditionals, and some form of looping, whether it's a `while` loop, a `for` loop, or a `jmp` or `GOTO` instruction, it's Turing complete.

Note that a conditional jump (`jne`, for example) satisfies both of the latter.

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

#97

Post by howerj »

I usually make my own dialects of languages that already exist, I got furthest making my own Forth and Lisp interpreters. As for why, the best way of learning a new language, for me at least, it to implement (or even just trying to implement) and interpreter or compiler for it. Despite being for learning, I have managed to make something semi-usuable out of both of them.

The interpreters are available at:

https://github.com/howerj/libforth

https://github.com/howerj/liblisp

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

#98

Post by vortico »

I designed a standard, a reference implementation in Ruby, and an unfinished self-compiled implementation for my unreleased language "Cub", which compiles to C and looks a bit Go-like while still preserving the full functionality that C offers, such as pointers, the stdlib, and binding to C libraries without glue code. Here's a short example. Let me know if this is interesting at all.

    include "stdio.h"

    class Widget {
        x int
        y int

        func init() {
            @x = 0
            @y = 0
        }

        func draw() {}
    }

    class Button extends Widget {
        func draw() {
            printf("Drawing button!\n")
        }
    }

    func main() int {
        w *Widget = new(Button)
        w@draw()
        delete(w)
    }

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

#99

Post by kevinmgranger »

antjanus wrote: post #93

I created a spec called MOML and is a markdown-friendly alternative to YAML. It uses plain markdown but allows you to section off parts of the markdown file in order to organize data in a sensible fashion. It has support for arrays so far it only has support for 3 data types: small text, text, and array (of small text or text). I'm slowly adding features to it like typing, object nesting, etc. I created it for easier…

I've been interested in creating something similar for a while, do you have a site for this yet?

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

#100

Post by jashkenas »

vortico wrote: post #87
jashkenas wrote: post #79

Yes, CoffeeScript, in 2009. Despite being a modest, fun experiment in stripping JavaScript down to a minimal skin, and without any corporate backing, it wound up catching on a little bit. Thanks to the hard work of Geoffrey Booth and Simon Lydell, among others, there's a new "V2" version that includes many ES6 and 7 features that's almost ready to go: http://coffeescript.org/v2/ CoffeeScript was designed extremely co…

What are your personal opinions on the future of Coffeescript? It's still being used for Atom, but I've noticed colleagues are finally getting used to ES6 and similar languages and switching to them. I'm still stuck on Coffeescript though for all of my frontend projects. It's too closely aligned to my utopia of a language to try to find anything else (which would surely have a smaller following anyway).

My personal opinion is much as it has been from day one:

    > I'm not about to start using it for real projects, 
    > it's really just a thought experiment about how nice 
    > JavaScript could be with an alternative syntax.
(Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014225)

I've used it a bit for fun, but never for work.

And I think that the future of JavaScript is probably always going to be JavaScript — until a web language comes along that's so compelling it's just obvious that it will be the right direction, and then the question won't even have to be asked.

CoffeeScript, as a concept, was mostly finished back in the 2010-2011 days, as a layer on top of ES3.

CoffeeScript 2, while a great step forward in terms of practicality for folks who want to use it with ES6 features like classes and modules — is also a step backwards for the notion of CoffeeScript: For example, we don't have to formalize classes anymore because JavaScript has them now, and unfortunately JavaScript has done them in a very static way that's not at all the direction CS would have taken. Ditto modules.

As an open source project, it will continue to work just as well as it always did. But I definitely don't foresee a return to general relevance, ever.

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