

The evolution of a programming language over four years - nkurz
http://codehereandthere.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-evolution-of-programming-language.html

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joe_the_user
I tend to think that in producing something like a programming language, it is
really worthwhile spending a lot of time thinking and rethinking.

The language is a complex "artifact" with many surprises waiting within it.
Wanting to go as quickly to implementation as possible seems like mistake -
better to spend "debugging" one's syntax and semantics and underlying data
structures.

~~~
mpweiher
Like many other things in code: you get better information about your design
from running code than from thought experiments.

"There is no difference between theory and practice. In theory."

~~~
joe_the_user
One certainly gets some new information about one's code when one runs it.

But there are plenty of pieces of information about an application that one
won't get by running a bit of code.

Running part of a language implementation won't tell you if the language
itself has a flaw that will annoy user because it won't run the entire
language.

Running a single module won't tell you if there's a flaw in the way
information flows in your application because the different modules aren't
interacting.

And if you writing an application and find flaws in a user interface or
similar large-scale aspects, you may find that you have to rewrite much of the
application or jury-rig existing code to make things work. And iteratively
jury-rigging code is a practice that guarantees extra effort latter.

~~~
nostrademons
The way to find flaws in a programming language is to write real programs that
do useful things in that language.

It's usually hard to write real programs that do useful things before the
programming language has an implementation.

~~~
joe_the_user
All I'm saying really is that the language syntax/semantics/etc is a
"functional part of the system" that needs testing to various degrees even if
that's hard pre-implementation. Having fallen into the trap myself, I think
it's easy for someone who's just cooking their own little language to think of
the syntax as being just a matter of taste and intuition instead and do
virtually no testing of these parts.

Obviously, producing a full implementation and then using that implementation
fully is the ideal way to find flaws. But considering that often everyone is
too committed to change a language at that point, the result is simply that we
right now have mostly languages that many consider flawed.

------
allard
The name of the language doesn't appear until the fifth paragraph?!

~~~
panic
For the curious, the programming language is called "Lily". There is a website
at [http://jesserayadkins.github.io](http://jesserayadkins.github.io).

