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If you are a developer and you have never written a language, you owe it to yourself to do this at least once. Writing a language (lexical, syntactic, semantic
by zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
If you are a developer and you have never written a language, you owe it to yourself to do this at least once.
Writing a language (lexical, syntactic, semantic phase and then code generation) will teach you an incredible amount of things in much less time it would take you to read about these things.
What your language looks like is completely irrelevant, this is strictly about learning from the journey.
And once you've done that, make sure to mention it in your resume: I, for one, will instantly give you brownie points if you mention in your resume that you wrote a language.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoI view writing a language as either a creative epiphany or evidence of psychosis, so when I see someone with a language on their CV I'm always careful to explore why they wrote it. Surprisingly often they think it's going to Solve All The Problems rather than allowing them to explore one of the deepest and most important parts of the programming art. I've written little languages (mostly for generating code in other languages, which proved to be an interesting way to explore certain design patterns) but always shied away from going all in on a bigger language. Maybe when I retire...