The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
mikedrivendevelopment.blogspot.com
The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
1–10 of 88 posts
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#2Another interesting thing to try (and maybe complementary as well) is building an interpreter or compiler for a language you like, trying to match the spec and feature set as closely as possible, and (hopefully) gaining more insight into the tradeoffs the language designers made when deciding why things are the way they are.
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#3> Notice how not a single variable in this code has a name. They all only have types.
Pretty cool, never even thought about this being possible.
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#4If you’re thinking of writing a language in earnest, you will create something much more valuable if you start from a novel semantics, and only then come up with a syntax to express those semantics, than if you were to start from syntax.
The world does not need yet another reskin of Java, but it could use new programming paradigms and new ways of solving problems.
As a learning exercise, implementing a language is worthwhile simply to gain the understanding that languages are not magic. To boot, you’ll pick up loads of useful techniques in the realms of parsing, data flow analysis, error reporting, and optimisation.
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#5The author says he turned to Coursera, but doesn't mention the course(s) he took, but I'm going to guess it's the the 'Compilers' class from Stanford[0]. I've heard good things about the course and the lecturer (Alex Aiken) so I really wanted to take the course while it was being offered but was too busy last year. I hope they offer it again this year.
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#6> Notice how not a single variable in this code has a name. They all only have types. Pretty cool, never even thought about this being possible.
It’s not a novel idea, but Wake does it quite well. Most variable names aren’t that useful—they’re just one of many possible syntactic ways to plumb values around.
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#7Another interesting thing to try (and maybe complementary as well) is building an interpreter or compiler for a language you like, trying to match the spec and feature set as closely as possible, and (hopefully) gaining more insight into the tradeoffs the language designers made when deciding why things are the way they are.
Yes, I've written tools for existing languages, and found just getting the parser right to be a challenge, be it with Emacs highlighting, flex/bison, what have you. Real languages aren't as tidy as the textbook examples.
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#8I've recently discovered PEG.js [0] and prototyped a small DSL in the browser [1]. Amazing stuff! I've dealt with ANTLR [2] before, but PEG.js feels so much nicer although it may not be as powerful!
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#9Another interesting thing to try (and maybe complementary as well) is building an interpreter or compiler for a language you like, trying to match the spec and feature set as closely as possible, and (hopefully) gaining more insight into the tradeoffs the language designers made when deciding why things are the way they are.
I did that with Ruby[1]. I learned things nobody should ever have to learn. But I also came away with a much greater appreciation for the basic model it uses, most of the biggest warts are at the surface (flip-flops, bizarre rules around how arguments get passed to blocks when the block takes one argument, etc). The way metaclasses work is, imo, one of the most elegant object models I've seen for the amount of power it gives you. It only took a couple hundred lines of code to implement reasonably correctly [2]. And along the way, I wrote another language for expressing some of the higher level VM-stuff (object model, exception propagation, etc).
I definitely recommend targeting languages that already have robust test suites. It makes things a lot easier. I was going to do a JS implementation a while ago, and there is a pretty solid suite for that from the ECMA[3], but it's kind of hard to extract. One of the things that made ruby so fun was that the test suite that existed at the time was rubyspec, which is actually written in ruby. Just getting to the point where I could run the specs was a huge moment where the implementation reached a measure of usability.
[1] https://github.com/stormbrew/channel9 -- it's a perennial project for me, it can run an old version of mspec+rubyspec as a ruby 1.8.6 implementation. Note that I skipped the parsing, leaving that to an existing parser written in ruby, because parsing ruby is a bigger project than a ruby-compatible VM.
[2] https://github.com/stormbrew/channel9/tree/master/environmen... -- see class.c9s and object.c9s for the vm specific script the fundamental implementation of language features is written in.
Re: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language
#10The author says he turned to Coursera, but doesn't mention the course(s) he took, but I'm going to guess it's the the 'Compilers' class from Stanford[0]. I've heard good things about the course and the lecturer (Alex Aiken) so I really wanted to take the course while it was being offered but was too busy last year. I hope they offer it again this year. https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers
I've listened to the lectures and they're awesome! he is a very good lecturer.