Wednesday, June 6, 2012

My Mental Evolution In Making A Language

Over the past year I've been thinking about how to make my own language. It's a pretty big undertaking and I've been too busy with other projects to put any serious effort into it, so I just think about it when I go for a walk. Mostly I try to convince myself to not make a language but it sounds like a lot of fun. With the explosion of JavaScript, and so few people wanting to write JavaScript, it seems like other people think writing a language sounds like fun too. We have CoffeeScript, IcedCoffeeScript, Roy, JSX, Amber, Dart, and many others. And that's just a list of recent languages that compile to JavaScript. Many more languages have come out, relatively recently, such as Go, Fancy, Elixir and Loop. Most of these languages will be minor dents in the history of programming languages, but that is OK. Not everything has to be important to be worth doing. But they have gotten me thinking. Should I create a language? What would it have to offer? Is the effort worth it? Below are thoughts that have steered my decision process for when I get some time to start hacking on a language. The thoughts are targeted at me, someone who has little experience building a language, not a professional.