I'm all for writing one's own language. However, anyone who does this should be sentenced to writing a significant program in this language afterwards. Only the

I'm all for writing one's own language. However, anyone who does this should be sentenced to writing a significant program in this language afterwards. Only then can they discover how wonderful or (more likely) horrible their creation actually is. Writing Towers of Hanoi in it doesn't count. Also, if this language isn't just going to be a toy, they need to write some sort of specification document about it. I'm tired of seeing new language websites announcing version 0.9 of the new language, accompanied by a statement that “we haven't yet written a language manual, but here are some example programs and some obsolete papers about prior versions”. I used to work in a senior position at a multinational firm. At one point, I went to the site of a company that had been recently purchased by my employers. Their major product was a large online system that was substantially written in a custom language. At that point, since the principals in the original company had left, there was not one employee left who understood this language completely.