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by xonix 753 days ago
It's funny to watch how often new programming languages resemble visually (and conceptually) the language they are written in. You can put it the other way: just look at a syntax sample and try to guess the implementation language.

I can see some problem here. Probably, it means the author is under heavy influence of the implementation language, that limits their thinking and creativity scope to the concepts of that language.
3 comments
aniviacat 753 days ago
I'm not sure if that is really a problem.

A single individual is likely to miss a lot of edge cases that a larger organisation (like the Rust foundation) has thought of while creating the language.

In that sense, I believe following the conventions created by a large and well-known entity is likely to produce better results.

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orphea 753 days ago
I was going to say: I bet this is written in Rust, they use https://docs.rs/syn/latest/syn/ to not write their own parser/lexer, and this is how you get Rust-looking languages... I'm surprised.
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glebbash 753 days ago
It's funny yeah but it makes sense and is not really a problem.

You would write a compiler in the language that is the closest to your perfect. Trying to fix the original language by making a "clone" of it and adding/removing features to your liking.

That is what I want to change here by making a very simple language that if someone would like they could just fork it and add/remove the needed features instead of building one from scratch.

If this idea won't work then at least a very simple compiler would be a good learning resource, so a win win anyways.

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xonix 753 days ago
Right, this is not the problem par se. To me this is a rather philosophical question. Related to the motivation behind the project.

If someone has some particular domain problem to which they need to introduce the new programming language, then, probably, it should look somehow different to all existing languages, otherwise they would be used.

Alternatively, the motivation could be: OK I need ExistingLanguageX(-alike) but in the domain/environment where it's not present yet, for example, WASM.

The motivation question is always of interest to me since it allows to judje for the long-term perspectives of the project.

However don't take this as a discouragement rant, learning case is a good motivation/raison d'être too.

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