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I'd almost agree, but at the same time such work can be a lot of fun. Personally I think an average programmer could knock out a BASIC, FORTH, or similar progr

I'd almost agree, but at the same time such work can be a lot of fun. Personally I think an average programmer could knock out a BASIC, FORTH, or similar programming language - with extensions - in a few months of part-time work, if not less. The harder part, the part that I can see taking a lot of time, is trying to create a "batteries included" language which has a very complete and complex standard library. Sure there are cheats if you're able to use dlopen, and FFI, to access C-stuff, but it's still not easy to create client-libraries for MySQL, Postgres, Redis, HTTP, etc, etc. Those kind of extensions/support make your language very very useful for users though. So there's a trade-off. I've put together a couple of simple languages, with a standard-library of maybe 30 functions. I'd draw the line at anything more no matter how appealing it might seem because I can just imagine how much of a time-sink it might become.

eternityforest 5y ago
The article is aimed at people hoping to make an actual useful language. Lots of people could make a BASIC or a FORTH in a week. It would almost certainly be rather useless, unless the language itself is the point of the project using it. 99% of GitHub repos appear to be useless. They show up because someone wanted to make a simpler version of something that they can understand. They don't teach much about the mainstream professional way. They often don't perform better, since things like GPU and SIMD are more important than simplicity. They are perfectly fine as toy projects. I have a few myself(Although none of them use any real interesting algorithms or new concepts or anything). But that's... all they are. At most they will become super niche things like suckless. But all programmers should know that Electron apps run just fine even on cheap modern hardware, and that existing solutions are probably going to be better than anything you can do, unless you spend months to years like they did. The programming community doesn't really seem to respect just doing everything by the book, the way a Microsoft dev would, and it's cool to see someone reminding people that it's a perfect good option to just grab some npm packages and make your thing and not bog yourself down with how it all works.

eternityforest 5y ago

The article is aimed at people hoping to make an actual useful language. Lots of people could make a BASIC or a FORTH in a week. It would almost certainly be rather useless, unless the language itself is the point of the project using it. 99% of GitHub repos appear to be useless. They show up because someone wanted to make a simpler version of something that they can understand. They don't teach much about the mainstream professional way. They often don't perform better, since things like GPU and SIMD are more important than simplicity. They are perfectly fine as toy projects. I have a few myself(Although none of them use any real interesting algorithms or new concepts or anything). But that's... all they are. At most they will become super niche things like suckless. But all programmers should know that Electron apps run just fine even on cheap modern hardware, and that existing solutions are probably going to be better than anything you can do, unless you spend months to years like they did. The programming community doesn't really seem to respect just doing everything by the book, the way a Microsoft dev would, and it's cool to see someone reminding people that it's a perfect good option to just grab some npm packages and make your thing and not bog yourself down with how it all works.