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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?

#201

Post by emmanueloga_ »

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 would happen if you tried to make a web language that wanted to strip HTML, CSS and JavaScript down to their essence — but were extremely liberal in the techniques you used to get there?

So, extremely liberal, you said... :-) Thinking about this I started to wonder about other systems producing a similar output to the trio html/css/js. I realized PostScript is such a system, but for fixed size documents. People actually explored using PostScript for GUI applications in the past, as described in [1]. At some point I'd like to explore [2] and [3] to see if some of the ideas could be modernized and adapted for the web.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#Use_as_a_display_sy... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

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

#202

Post by ioddly »

I created several programming languages a few years ago, thinking "I could do this better" (than the languages I was using). Turns out it was harder than I thought, but I learned a lot about how software works. It remains by far the best thing I've done to advance my skills.

Some time after that, the Julia language came into existence (http://julialang.org/) which is pretty much everything I wanted out of a language.

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

#203

Post by white-flame »

I've created somewhere around 5-10 languages. Most are domain specific, some are new internally generated general purpose languages in "black box" use in client software because we saw the need, some are from clients which needed languages built.

Mostly we value declarative specification, however some domains do require in-order recipe style expressivity. The more problem-space the language can be, the easier it is to iterate, catch problems early & easily, report more meaningful errors, and optimize the compilation.

It's a craft, but I honestly think it's not a hard one to pick up. The major thing is being able to step back and think about the problem humans are tackling, not grabbing your default C style (or whatever) and trying to bolt it into some solution space. As programmers, it's easy to give zero thought to all the boilerplate and machine-fiddling required for typical programming; you must set that aside when starting from scratch with a new problem. You must also realize when existing or in-progress solutions become boilerplaty and fiddly, and have the wherewithal to step back and notice that it's not expressing the correct level of abstraction for the problem.

We've supported Bloomberg, ADP, nuclear power plants & other utilities, etc, so we need something truly viable, robust, maintainable, and worth the client's money. You have to think in their shoes, understanding the industry vocabulary of the user. You need to give them tools that closely match their natural expression of what they want the machine to do, not divert them into being programmers, yet still have all the power they need for their tasks at hand. It all starts with having a great business analyst.

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

#204

Post by amenghra »

koonsolo wrote: post #24

I'm currently making a programming language that tries not to be a programming language. To give some background: I'm working on a program to allow anyone to create video games. But to add custom functionality, my users need to use some kind of programming/scripting language. Since these are non-technical people, it must be as easy and simple as possible. Therefore I'm now making a language (called Screenplay) where…

You should check out Alice, developed at cmu. It was a programming environment designed to build interactive 3D stories.

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

#205

Post by cosinetau »

david927 wrote: post #199

Yes, Kayia (kayia.org) because code is not meant to be read, it's meant to be queried, and text files are a ridiculous way to hold information to be queried.

Groovy. Did you write this for actuarial work or something as a replacement for spreadsheets? The philosophy aside, what did you expect the use cases to be?

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

#207

Post by Osiris »

STRML wrote: post #88
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…

Just wanted to say thank you for CoffeeScript. Despite its somewhat ambiguous syntax it really was a better version of JavaScript, and it would be fair to say it really mainstreamed the idea of JS as a target language. Many of the ideas in CS made it all the way to ES6. Many other ideas didn't make it to ES6 because CS fleshed out issues that quite possibly would have been missed otherwise. It was a huge net positive…

I've never written CoffeeScript, but I agree that it had a significant impact on the evolution of the ECMAScript standard. A simple example, arrow functions, lexical scope (const, let), and `this` binding.

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

#208

Post by Osiris »

koonsolo wrote: post #24

I'm currently making a programming language that tries not to be a programming language. To give some background: I'm working on a program to allow anyone to create video games. But to add custom functionality, my users need to use some kind of programming/scripting language. Since these are non-technical people, it must be as easy and simple as possible. Therefore I'm now making a language (called Screenplay) where…

The problem is that there is still a syntax that's required to know. Look at AppleScript. It uses keywords that sound like easy English but knowing how to use AppleScript still takes a lot of reading.

After reading the article about RUST, I have been thinking about how a compiler could take source code and write it back with fixes/suggestions right into the source so if you make a silly mistake, the compiler can just say "I think you meant..." and offer to fix it for you.

In your language, it would be beneficial to avoid "Syntax error!" and implement something like "Did you mean...", or have synonyms like "says", "exclaims", "talks", etc that compile to the same thing but add flexibility (or the compiler automatically re-writes to the preferred syntax)

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

#209

Post by danaliv »

chc4 wrote: post #148
danaliv wrote: post #124

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 stuf…

Have you looked at Crystal before? It's a compiled statically typed variant of Ruby.

I haven't! I'll check that out.

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

#210

Post by danaliv »

ufmace wrote: post #165
danaliv wrote: post #124

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 stuf…

Sounds interesting. Have you ever tried Kotlin? I've mostly worked with Ruby and C#/.NET, and Kotlin, based on JVM, feels like an interesting fusion plus a few extra tricks. It's still mostly static, like Java, but adds a ton of stuff around blocks/lambdas and non-nullable reference types.

Ah, funny, I was just reading about Kotlin yesterday. I haven't tried it but it looks interesting!
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