4 ms·

The most important advice in my mind would be to waste as little time as possible on the parser; Forth is trivial, Lisp a tiny bit more involved. https://githu

• gjm11 6y ago
  If you care at all about getting people to _use_ your language (which you might not, as with Haskell's "Avoid popularity at all costs" slogan) then I don't think this is good advice. Both Forth and Lisp have seen less adoption than their aficionados think they deserve as a result of their offputting-to-muggles syntax. In both cases, arguably the most important merits of the language actually necessitate the unusual syntax. That might mean that Lisp and Forth couldn't have done better with more conventional syntax. If so, what that means isn't that you should after all give minimal attention to the parser; it's that in some cases a syntax that's very simply parseable might be a good one -- but, unless you get very lucky, you will only discover that by thinking deeply about your syntax rather than doing something minimal and hoping it ends up having subtle merits like those of Forth and Lisp.
  • codr7 6y ago
    They're simply discrete initial steps on the way to a more elaborate syntax, it's not either or. Parsing nearly killed my interest in programming languages, it's rarely the part that get people excited.