
Growing a Compiler (2009) - ingve
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~mckeeman/cs48/mxcom/gem/html/GrowingCompiler.html
======
big_spammer
This made me find and read "Growing a language"

[https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf)

"In a race, a small language with warts will beat a well designed language
because users will not wait for the right thing; they will use the language
that is quick and cheap, and put up with the warts. Once a small language
fills a niche, it is hard to take its place."

~~~
bitwize
This should be in the preface to the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce Field
Operations Manual.

~~~
mrkgnao
Nah, you haven't _really_ avoided success at all costs until you've
evangelized a committee-designed functional language with pervasive laziness.

------
richard_shelton
An interesting approach! But old META II (mentioned in the original article)
system and its derivatives are looking more practical to me. I think, it's
more effective to have two simple DSLs, one for parsing and another one for
tree transforming like it was done in Cwic and TREE-МЕТА, which are grew from
original META II (self-described in a few lines of code).

------
jamescostian
The amount of JS bashing here is so high. Pretty much any popular language
fits the given description. Humble yourself and read about why your language
of choice sucks:
[https://wiki.theory.org/index.php/YourLanguageSucks](https://wiki.theory.org/index.php/YourLanguageSucks)

~~~
dang
Please don't do programming language flamewars here.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14435298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14435298)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
Rexxar
I'm may be mistaken, but I interpret jamescostian's comment as "every language
has some problems, let's stop this sort of discussion". May you intended to
detach the parent comment ?

