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>it's often much better to start with a simple programming language and customise it to your need, than to have a high-level programming language painstakingly

>it's often much better to start with a simple programming language and customise it to your need, than to have a high-level programming language painstakingly customised and tuned for an application that turns out to be two millimetres to the left of the one that you actually want. I am interested to know if you had other examples in mind when you said this. Disclaimer: not trying to start a discussion on languages, or lang war.

JadeNB 16y ago
> I am interested to know if you had other examples in mind when you said this. Disclaimer: not trying to start a discussion on languages, or lang war. I'm not sure why you'd want to disclaim trying to start a discussion on languages; it seems like a good thing. The sentence I wrote was originally intended just to describe TeX, but it seemed to me in retrospect that it applied almost as well to Lisp. Although the design philosophies of the two languages are completely different, both are intended to be the foundations for lots of little languages; Knuth has said that he was always surprised that people were happy to settle so quickly on TeX and LaTeX, rather than creating and selecting among many more specialised dialects. (Of course, a quick glance at CTAN shows that it is folly to think that everyone who uses TeX or LaTeX does the same thing with it!) I posted some more examples of highly customisable little languages at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535807 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535807, but I should mention that I haven't used them.