For implementing languages, I highly recommend Scheme, Haskell and Scala. These languages are hell-on-wheels for tearing apart and transforming syntax trees.

For implementing languages, I highly recommend Scheme, Haskell and Scala. These languages are hell-on-wheels for tearing apart and transforming syntax trees. I teach a compilers class, and I encourage my students to use a mixture of Scala and Scheme. If you're thinking about implementing a language, you might want to look at some of the blog posts I wrote for my students: * A Scheme interpreter in Scala: http://matt.might.net/articles/denotational-interpreter-for-lisp-and-scheme-like-lambda-calculus-based-language-lambdo/ http://matt.might.net/articles/denotational-interpreter-for-... * A meta-circular Scheme interpreter: http://matt.might.net/articles/metacircular-evaluation-and-first-class-run-time-macros/ http://matt.might.net/articles/metacircular-evaluation-and-f... * Compiling Scheme to C: http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-scheme-to-c/ http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-scheme-to-c/ * Compiling Scheme to Java: http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-to-java/ http://matt.might.net/articles/compiling-to-java/ * Architectures for interpreters: http://matt.might.net/articles/writing-an-interpreter-substitution-denotational-big-step-small-step/ http://matt.might.net/articles/writing-an-interpreter-substi...