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That's not the way to see the process. We have been highly successful at little languages already: they are, in essence, why when I write something like "a = a + 1" I can assume it works identically in C, Javascript, and Python. (Semantically, it doesn't! But it is a portable intent.) You might object and say, "but variable assignment and addition, that's a big language thing." It isn't, though; it's just an infix expression. And infix didn't pop out of nowhere; it had to be invented as part of the gradual creep upwards from machine level "coding" into a more abstract semantics. Infix parsers are small, and while the complete language is larger, what it's presenting is infix-compatible. "Regex" is the same way: there is a general definition of regular expressions, and then there are some common variants of regex, the implemented semantics. The boundary between "the language needs its own compiler and runtime support" and "the language exists as an API call you pass a string into, which compiles into data structures visible to the host language" is a fluid one. And the most reasonable way of making little languages involves seeing the pattern you're making in your host and "harvesting" it. In the previous eras, there were severe performance penalties to trying to bootstrap in this way, and so generating a binary was essential to success. But nowadays, it's another form of glue overhead. If you define syntactic boundaries on your glue, it actually becomes easier to deal with over time. Documentation-wise, it's the same: if the language is sufficiently small, it feels like documentation for a library, not a language. |