kate

I know a lot of programming languages, but I’m still not really happy with any of them. It started with PBASIC, then Objective-C, C, Common Lisp, Python, C++, Java, Ruby, Scheme, Assembly (Propeller), and now OCaml and Rust, in that order. Of all these languages, my favorites are probably Ruby, Common Lisp, and Rust.

As you can probably tell from that, I like functional programming. The idea that any call is merely a transformation of the initial data is really cool. But there’s a couple of bad problems I have with those three languages:

• Speed
• Portability, specifically to new architectures
• Adoption

Each of these problems applies to at least two of the languages.

Ruby is flexible and powerful, but is slow as molasses. The Rubinius project is definitely helping with this, being a JIT for Ruby, but they still have a ways to go, as they’re currently working on 1.9.3 support. And, the overhead of a VM still exists. Out of the three languages, this definitely has the best community support (probably because of Rails, but beggers can’t be choosers). EDIT: Apparently, rubinius reached 2.0.0 without me noticing, and now supports Ruby 2.1 syntax. Way to go, RBX!

Common Lisp is the langauge for firsts. GC, cons pairs, compile-time AST editing (macros), type inference. If you can think of it, CL probably has it. And it has the speed Ruby doesn’t, with 30+ years of academic research poured into projects like SBCL. But it still falls short. The CL library scene is sad, and only recently has a decent dependency management system come to fruition. Yes, I’m looking at you, quicklisp. However, cross-compiling clisp is no easy feat, and running that on a microcontroller is not going to happen.

Rust is the newcomer to the scene, the proverbial hipster. There’s a great deal of hype surrounding Rust, at least at my school, and it looks absolutely amazing. But it’s a bit too C-like and low-level for my taste. Plus, there’s next to no documentation for the language, the best thing being the symbiotic project the language is being developed with, Servo. Out of all these languages, Rust is probably the closest to what I would like to work with on a daily basis.

Since no language has the features I want, or the facilities to modify it to the degree I want, I’ve decided to write my own language, called Brick.

This is not a small project.

Language design is a big deal, and I’ve spent the last two and a half months writing syntax ideas, reconciling possible conflicts, working out how systems might interact. And slowly, I came to a point where I started to know what this would be like. Next post, I’ll talk about some of the design decisions, and the syntax.