I built a programming language using Claude Code • Hacker News Board

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#121

Post by NuclearPM » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

asciimov wrote: post #90

This takes all the satisfaction out of spending a few well thought out weekends to build your own language. So many fun options: compiled or interpreted; virtual machine, or not; single pass, double pass, or (Leeloo Dallas) Multipass? No cool BNF grammars to show off either… It’s missing all the heart, the soul, of deciding and trading off options to get something to work just for you. It’s like you bought a rat bike…

Deciding on the syntax and semantics myself and using AI to help implement my toy language has been very rewarding.

Mine is an Io and Rebol inspired language that uses SQlite and Luajit as a runtime.

1.to 10 .map[n | n * n].each[n | n.say!]

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#122

Post by rebolek » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #51

marssaxman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constraints enforced in the language still matter. A language which offers certain correctness guarantees may still be the most efficient way to build a particular piece of software even when it's a machine writing the code. There may actually be more value in creating specialized languages now, not less. Most new languages historically go nowhere because convincing human programmers to spend the time it would ta…

> every AI coding bot will learn your new language If there are millions of lines on github in your language. Otherwise the 'teaching AI to write your language' part will occupy so much context and make it far less efficient that just using typescript.

That’s not true. I’m working on a language and LLMs have no problems writing code in it even if there exists ~200 lines of code in the language and all of them are in my repo.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#123

Post by NuclearPM » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

p0w3n3d wrote: post #67

I'd say these times will be filled with a lot of tailored-to-you "self"-made software, but the question is, are we increasing amount of information in the world? I heard that claude and chatgpt are getting good at mathematical proofs which give really something to our knowledge, but all other things are neutral to entropy, if not decreasing. Strange time to live in, strange valuations and devaluations...

Neutral to entropy? What do you mean?

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#124

Post by gf000 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #109

gf000 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that relate to Go being a verbose language?

Its not verbose to some of us. It is explicit in what it does, meaning I don't have to wonder if there's syntatic sugar hiding intent. Drastically more minimal than equivalent code in other languages.

Verbosity is an objective metric.

Code readability is another, correlating one, but this is more subjective. To me go scores pretty low here - code flow would be readable were it not for the huge amount of noise you get from error "handling" (it is mostly just syntactic ceremony, often failing to properly handle the error case, and people are desensitized to these blocks so code review are more likely to miss these).

For function signatures, they made it terser - in my subjective opinion - at the expense of readability. There were two very mainstream schools of thought with relation to type signature syntax, `type ident` and `ident : type`. Go opted for a third one that is unfamiliar to both bases, while not even having the benefits of the second syntax (e.g. easy type syntax, subjective but that : helps the eye "pattern match" these expressions).

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#125

Post by kccqzy » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

wild_egg wrote: post #117

heavyset_go wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe the author owns the language. Not according to the US Copyright Office. It is 100% LLM output, so it is not copyrighted, thus it's free for anyone to do anything with it and no claimed ownership or license can stop them.

Do you have a citation for that?

There are so many cases of the copyright office rejecting the request to register copyright for AI-generated works. Here’s just one example: https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/... (skip to section III).

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#126

Post by joshstrange » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:24 PM UTC

Maxatar wrote: post #114

raincole wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every AI coding bot will learn your new language If there are millions of lines on github in your language. Otherwise the 'teaching AI to write your language' part will occupy so much context and make it far less efficient that just using typescript.

I have not found this to be the case. My company has some proprietary DSLs we use and we can provide the spec of the language with examples and it manages to pick up on it and use it in a very idiomatic manner. The total context needed is 41k tokens. That's not trivial but it's also not that much, especially with ChatGPT Codex and Gemini now providing context lengths of 1 million tokens. Claude Code is very likely to…

> Claude Code is very likely to soon offer 1 million tokens as well

You can do it today if you are willing to pay (API or on top of your subscription) [0]

> The 1M context window is currently in beta. Features, pricing, and availability may change.

> Extended context is available for:

> API and pay-as-you-go users: full access to 1M context

> Pro, Max, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers: available with extra usage enabled

> Selecting a 1M model does not immediately change billing. Your session uses standard rates until it exceeds 200K tokens of context. Beyond 200K tokens, requests are charged at long-context pricing with dedicated rate limits. For subscribers, tokens beyond 200K are billed as extra usage rather than through the subscription.

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/model-config#extended-contex...

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#127

Post by ractive » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

> [...] “just one more prompt” [...]. That creates a strong urge to try using it for everything all the time. And just like with slot machines, the [house](https://www.anthropic.com) always wins.

I really liked that part - the house always wins.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#128

Post by giancarlostoro » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

gf000 wrote: post #124

giancarlostoro wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not verbose to some of us. It is explicit in what it does, meaning I don't have to wonder if there's syntatic sugar hiding intent. Drastically more minimal than equivalent code in other languages.

Verbosity is an objective metric. Code readability is another, correlating one, but this is more subjective. To me go scores pretty low here - code flow would be readable were it not for the huge amount of noise you get from error "handling" (it is mostly just syntactic ceremony, often failing to properly handle the error case, and people are desensitized to these blocks so code review are more likely to miss these).…

Every time I hear complaints about error handling, I wonder if people have next to no try catch blocks or if they just do magic to hide that detail away in other languages? Because I still have to do error handling in other languages roughly the same? Am I missing something?

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#129

Post by idiotsecant » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

tartoran wrote: post #108

idiotsecant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only hope is that AGI arises and picks up where humanity left off. Otherwise I think this is the long dark teatime of human engineering of all sorts.

So you’re hoping for a blackbox uninspectable by humans? That to me sounds like a nightmare, a nightmare worse than all the cruft and stupid rules humanity accrued over time. Let’s hope the future tech is inspectable and understandable by humans.

I think if we assume that AGI will be a thing the odds of future tech remaining inspectable by humans is pretty unlikely. Would you build a car so that your dog can maintain it?

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#130

Post by _zagj » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

bobjordan wrote: post #58

I've been working on a large codebase that was already significant before LLM-assisted programming, leveraging code I’d written over a decade ago. Since integrating Claude and Codex, the system has evolved and grown massively. Realistically, there’s a lot in there now that I simply couldn't have built in a standard human lifetime without them. That said, the core value of the software wouldn't exist without a human a…

> Realistically, there’s a lot in there now that I simply couldn't have built in a standard human lifetime without them.

I have yet to see a study showing something like a 2x or better boost in programmer productivity through LLMs. Usually it's something like 10-30%, depending on what metrics you use (which I don't doubt). Maybe it's 50% with frontier models, but seeing these comments on HN where people act like they're 10x more productive with these tools is strange.