Here's an interesting anecdote in the same spirit of skipping uninteresting work. Back when I worked with a rather experienced Haskell developer, he also wanted

Here's an interesting anecdote in the same spirit of skipping uninteresting work. Back when I worked with a rather experienced Haskell developer, he also wanted to design a language but dreaded the part where a parser was needed. Besides that, he took the further shortcut of representing functions in his language using functions in the host language Haskell. That is to say, the AST for functions contains Haskell functions. This technique is called higher-order abstract syntax. Naturally there are limitations here. There's not much you can do to poke into the structure of Haskell functions other than evaluating them, so any sort of optimization and code gen work must happen by evaluating the function in Haskell, which gives you more of a challenge in designing the AST. That said so far the author's language resembles simply typed lambda calculus and this is generally too simple. The meat of the language hasn't actually been designed yet in this post.