Codecraft

A while back, I was reading the blog of somebody smart (can’t remember who), and a comment jumped out at me: “If you really want a black belt in computer science, try writing a programming language. The depth and breadth of experience you get when you invent Python or Lisp or Smalltalk or C++ or C#–and implement its ecosystem, not just code a parser for a CS class–gives you a wisdom and education that’s rare and precious.” (I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s the gist of it.)

Sounds good, I thought. I think I’ll give it a shot.

“Confusion of Tongues”, by Gustave Doré. The Tower of Babel resonates beyond moral history. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

I began doing research and taking notes. I thought hard about which features I liked and detested in programming languages. I read critiques and tributes to various languages by detractors and fans. I identified pieces of syntactic sugar that I wanted to support. I took a wad of existing code and tried to rewrite it using the language I was drafting. I picked some conventions for filenames. I played with yacc and antlr and experimented with definitions of context-free grammars.

And then I stalled.

It wasn’t good enough.

My new language was nifty. It combined a lot of the best features of my favorite languages: closures, list comprehensions, lambdas, static if, robust type inference, unified function call syntax, with blocks, variadic templates, mixins, nullable primitives, built-in support for design by contract, and more. I actually believed (perhaps naively) that I knew how to implement a good portion of these ideas in a compiler.

But I began to intuit that nifty != great. And the longer and harder I thought about it, the more convinced I became.

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