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I went looking for a single Markdown file I could dump into an LLM to "teach" it the language and found this one: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blo

by simonw 10mo ago

I went looking for a single Markdown file I could dump into an LLM to "teach" it the language and found this one: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.md https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.m... Optimistically I dumped the whole thing into Claude Opus 4.5 as a system prompt to see if it could generate a one-shot program from it: llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \ -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMORY.md \ 'Build me a mandelbrot fractal CLI tool in this language' > /tmp/fractal.nano Here's the transcript for that. The code didn't work: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7847f022566d11629ec2139f1d109fb8 https://gist.github.com/simonw/7847f022566d11629ec2139f1d109... So I fired up Claude Code inside a checkout of the nanolang and told it how to run the compiler and let it fix the problems... which DID work. Here's that transcript: https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5/index.html https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5... And the finished code, with its output in a comment: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e7f3577adcfd392ab7fa23b1295d00f2 https://gist.github.com/simonw/e7f3577adcfd392ab7fa23b1295d0... So yeah, a good LLM can definitely figure out how to use this thing given access to the existing documentation and the ability to run that compiler.

nodja 10mo ago
I think you need to either feed it all of ./docs or give your agent access to those files so it can read them as reference. The MEMORY.md file you posted mentions ./docs/CANONICAL_STYLE.md and ./docs/LLM_CORE_SUBSET.md and they in turn mention indirectly other features and files inside the docs folder.
- simonw 10mo ago
  Yeah, I think you're right about that. The thing that really unlocked it was Claude being able to run a file listing against nanolang/examples and then start picking through the examples that were most relevant to figuring out the syntax: https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5/page-001.html#msg-2026-01-19T23-43-10-761Z https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...
hahahahhaah 10mo ago
But are you losing horsepower of the LLM available to problem solving on a given task by doing so?
- simonw 10mo ago
  Maybe a little, but Claude has 200,000 tokens these days and GPT-5.2 has 400,000 - there's a lot of space.
  - hahahahhaah 10mo ago
    True. You would know this better but are you also burning "attention" by giving it a new language? Rather than use its familiar Python pathways it needs to attend more to generate the unseen language. It needs to KV across from the language spec to the language to the goal. Rather than just speak the Python or JS it is uses to speaking.
e12e 10mo ago
Oh, wow. I thought the control flow from the readme was a little annoying with the prefix -notation for bigger/smaller than; # Control flow if (> x 0) { (println "positive") } else { (println "negative or zero") } But that's nothing compared to the scream for a case/switch-statement in the Mandelbrot example... # Gradient: " .:-=+*#%@" let gradient: string = " .:-=+*#%@" let gradient_len: int = 10 let idx: int = (/ (* iter gradient_len) max_iter) if (>= idx gradient_len) { return "@" } else { if (== idx 0) { return " " } else { if (== idx 1) { return "." } else { if (== idx 2) { return ":" } else { if (== idx 3) { return "-" } else { if (== idx 4) { return "=" } else { if (== idx 5) { return "+" } else { if (== idx 6) { return "*" } else { if (== idx 7) { return "#" } else { if (== idx 8) { return "%" } else { return "@" } }
- kamaal 10mo ago
  If you are planning to write so many if else statements. You might as well write Prolog.
- antonvs 10mo ago
  > scream for a case/switch-statement Maybe I’m missing some context, but all that actually should be needed in the top-level else block is ‘gradient[idx]’. Pretty much anything else is going to be longer, harder to read, and less efficient.
  - 10mo ago

by simonw 10mo ago

nodja 10mo ago

I think you need to either feed it all of ./docs or give your agent access to those files so it can read them as reference. The MEMORY.md file you posted mentions ./docs/CANONICAL_STYLE.md and ./docs/LLM_CORE_SUBSET.md and they in turn mention indirectly other features and files inside the docs folder.

simonw 10mo ago
Yeah, I think you're right about that. The thing that really unlocked it was Claude being able to run a file listing against nanolang/examples and then start picking through the examples that were most relevant to figuring out the syntax: https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5/page-001.html#msg-2026-01-19T23-43-10-761Z https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...

hahahahhaah 10mo ago

But are you losing horsepower of the LLM available to problem solving on a given task by doing so?

simonw 10mo ago
Maybe a little, but Claude has 200,000 tokens these days and GPT-5.2 has 400,000 - there's a lot of space.
- hahahahhaah 10mo ago
  True. You would know this better but are you also burning "attention" by giving it a new language? Rather than use its familiar Python pathways it needs to attend more to generate the unseen language. It needs to KV across from the language spec to the language to the goal. Rather than just speak the Python or JS it is uses to speaking.

e12e 10mo ago

Oh, wow. I thought the control flow from the readme was a little annoying with the prefix -notation for bigger/smaller than; # Control flow if (> x 0) { (println "positive") } else { (println "negative or zero") } But that's nothing compared to the scream for a case/switch-statement in the Mandelbrot example... # Gradient: " .:-=+*#%@" let gradient: string = " .:-=+*#%@" let gradient_len: int = 10 let idx: int = (/ (* iter gradient_len) max_iter) if (>= idx gradient_len) { return "@" } else { if (== idx 0) { return " " } else { if (== idx 1) { return "." } else { if (== idx 2) { return ":" } else { if (== idx 3) { return "-" } else { if (== idx 4) { return "=" } else { if (== idx 5) { return "+" } else { if (== idx 6) { return "*" } else { if (== idx 7) { return "#" } else { if (== idx 8) { return "%" } else { return "@" } }

kamaal 10mo ago
If you are planning to write so many if else statements. You might as well write Prolog.
antonvs 10mo ago
> scream for a case/switch-statement Maybe I’m missing some context, but all that actually should be needed in the top-level else block is ‘gradient[idx]’. Pretty much anything else is going to be longer, harder to read, and less efficient.
- 10mo ago