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I even bought into that meme a bit in the early 2000s. It turns out that most "language" designers (including myself) aren't that good at it, and that designin

I even bought into that meme a bit in the early 2000s. It turns out that most "language" designers (including myself) aren't that good at it, and that designing a language that isn't just yet another leaky abstraction takes a lot of work. Your "interface" is the entire syntax and semantics of your "language."

stevedonovan 9y ago
Yes - there is definitely a hierarchy of difficulty: user code, library, macros, full syntax extension. The trouble is that designing new languages takes a lot of _taste_ and experience. We don't know the full domain, so DSLs tend to have bits added to them as knowledge of the domain grows - and that's the scary point in language evolution. So, despite these things being tremendous fun, I tend more towards correctness and clarity at the expense of sheer expressiveness. (An example of ad-hoc language design is CMake, which makes my eyes bleed. Kitware should have used an existing language - even tcl would have been better.)