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Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C

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Re: Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C

#3

Post by jonathanstrange »

Went to the doc directory and got this:

TODO: Add Doc

Could developers please stop doing that? These 'agile development' and 'release early and often' mantras have really gone overboard.

Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a single five-line hello world program?

Re: Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C

#4

Post by Hemospectrum »

rubyfan wrote: post #2

Looks like a mashup of Ruby, JavaScript and tiny bit of Python.

I’m mostly seeing a lot of Python. The examples show that multiple assignment unpacks collections, functions can be called with argument name assignment, and collections can be unpacked into named arguments, as opposed to using collections to replace named arguments.

Re: Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C

#5

Post by _ph_ »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #3

Went to the doc directory and got this: TODO: Add Doc Could developers please stop doing that? These 'agile development' and 'release early and often' mantras have really gone overboard. Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a single five-line hello world program?

In all fairness: there seems to be a little bit more of documentation on http://www.lemon-lang.org So, whoever posted this to hacker news should have used that link rather than the GitHub link and of course, it seems to be way to early in development to post it at all. I have some quite unfinished projects of mine on GitHub, but I would never post a link to them until they are in a state where they would be relevant to a larger community.

Re: Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C

#6

Post by exDM69 »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #3

Went to the doc directory and got this: TODO: Add Doc Could developers please stop doing that? These 'agile development' and 'release early and often' mantras have really gone overboard. Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a single five-line hello world program?

> Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a single five-line hello world program?

As someone who has done a handful of compiler/interpreter projects: I don't think that they expect anyone at this point to be using that language. They're targetting it at language geeks like myself (who go and dig around the source, which I just did). Maybe in some years' time this project will reach a stage where end user docs matter.

A little more verbose readme would have been nice, though. Things that I did not find out by looking at the examples/docs, but I care about:

  * what paradigm? imperative, functional, etc?
  * interpreted or compiled language?
  * what's the target? interpreter, a bytecode VM, LLVM, compile-to-C, native codegen?
  * static/dynamic typing? type inference?
By looking around the code, I think that this is an interpreted language with dynamic typing that's implemented with a stack-based bytecode virtual machine. Not unlike Lua, Python or Ruby, that is.

Re: Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C

#8

Post by sparkie »

exDM69 wrote: post #6
jonathanstrange wrote: post #3

Went to the doc directory and got this: TODO: Add Doc Could developers please stop doing that? These 'agile development' and 'release early and often' mantras have really gone overboard. Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a single five-line hello world program?

> Why would anybody use a programming language with zero documentation for anything? Are we supposed to guess the language and its features from a single five-line hello world program? As someone who has done a handful of compiler/interpreter projects: I don't think that they expect anyone at this point to be using that language. They're targetting it at language geeks like myself (who go and dig around the source, w…

I'm a language geek and none of the above is what I want to see when I read about a new language. What I want to know is, what does this language offer that no other language does? What platform it runs on or whatnot is trivial boring detail that I might want to know afterwards if the language offers something interesting to try out.

Re: Lemon – An embeddable, lightweight programming language in ANSI C

#10

Post by baybal2 »

nodefourtytwo wrote: post #9

What problem does it solve?

Looks like an attempt of a JS programmer to reinvent a lighter weight JS with aim at system programming.

If it is yet again tied to a complex, feature rich VM (a stack based one), then he went the wrong way in achieving his goal. Direct interpretation should've been the way forward for such task.

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