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

16 hour Forth to replace everything and solve our problems.

Forgive me, but I'm leaning toward siding with that CTO on this one.

I've been tinkering with a language I call beep for a couple years now. It's sort of my programming equivalent of the old hot-rod sitting in the garage. I'll disappear for a weekend while I work on it and then not even think about it for a month or two.

I made it/am making it mostly as an exercise. I like to know how things work, and there's no better way for me to learn than by doing. It's also just fun to make stuff. Last (and definitely least), it's an expression of a certain degree of frustration I have with the current offerings. My dream language—oh, maybe I should've named it "dream"—would feel like Ruby but have static types and no nil references. I wholeheartedly acknowledge the tension inherent in that statement; much of Ruby's power comes from its dynamism. But like I said, it's just an exercise. :)

Not sure if that qualifies as not-a-toy-language. Is a language's "toyness" based on its simplicity, or its intended use?

I created a Scheme in Haskell, complete with tutorial on implementation, to help people learn programming language design in Haskell. The goal is to make a solid, or nearly industry ready, Haskell project, and a narrative(free book) that people are able to follow along. I'm looking for contributors, if you'd like to take a look: https://github.com/write-you-a-scheme-v2/scheme, tutorial: wespiser.com/writings/wyas/home.html.

Before this, I was on a team building a programming language for financial analysis. It had basic javascript semantics, was interpreted, and mostly returned results as data visualizations to browser based UI. Why? Because the investors believed there is a significant market for bundling data sources, along with a proprietary programming language to hedge/mutual funds. The real difficulty in achieving this is the man-years of time required to build a language capable of reproducing the same analysis used in by quants in production before ever being able to apply a technology, like GPUs, you bet can make things better. It can be especially difficult for the business leaders to make decisions that impact a programming languages development, as the highly technical quickly meets the business relevant. If you ever go this route, have system architecture/design for the programming language that will bring you to a MVP. Otherwise, you'll be paying developers to play with prog lang ideas for years!

That reminds me a bit of PILOT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PILOT

I kind of make a new language for every project. Rather than writing a program directly, I write pseudocode to solve the program, and then build a language that runs just that pseudocode.

I had to query lots of data from webpages, so I made a pattern matching language where the program is a sample of the webpage. E.g. to query the the text of some text, you write the "program"/pattern {.}. Or if the webpage had multiple some text, you would use the pattern {.}+

Then I noticed, you sometimes need more expressive power than simple patterns, e.g. returning an element depending on the value of another element, so I added variables and allowed some kind of XPath expressions inside the {}. It was not really XPath, because XPath 1 has no variables, but after a while I noticed, XPath 2 has variables. There was no XPath 2 interpreter for the host language, so I implemented a standard-conformant XPath 2 interpreter for this. Not really my language, but my implementation of a language. Later I updated it to XPath 3, which became far more complex than expected, since XPath 3 does not just has variables, but is fully Turing-complete with anonymous functions. And a type system with 50+ different types. Makes JavaScript look trivial. I also noticed, XPath 3 is almost the same as XQuery 3, so I implemented that, too. http://www.videlibri.de/cgi-bin/xidelcgi

Which brings us back to your XmlPl, because XQuery was designed for the same tasks. That example node[] main() { helloString; } would become declare function main() as node() { {$helloString} } in XQuery.

Previously I made a completely different XML processor for my personal webpage. Keep all content in XML files, make an HTML file for the layout of the webpage, and then insert the data from the XML in the HTML at statements like {{$WRITE some/kind/of/xpath }}. It had control structures {{$IF}}, {{$FOREACH}}. I thought it was a good idea to keep the program separate from the markup, but it only looks confusing, so stopped using that language.

Most recently I made a language to sort my mails when they arrive on the server. More a toy than a full programming language, but the cleanest way to keep those filters http://hg.benibela.de/mailfilter/