<story><title>Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years</title><url>http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/18/programming-language-development-the-past-5-years/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hammerdr</author><text>I spent some time doing several small programming exercises in Ioke. I&apos;ve also done similar exercises in several programming languages ranging from C to Java to Haskell to Ioke.&lt;p&gt;Ioke was ridiculously clean in almost every scenario. The only part I missed was that I didn&apos;t delve deep enough to really use the macros to their fullest extent. Something that would take 50 lines of idiomatic Ruby took 10 lines of Ioke. Ruby is already a very expressive language and yet Ioke could express the same thing in half the amount of code.&lt;p&gt;The author of this post is not kidding when he says that Ola designed the language with no regard for performance. The language is slow.&lt;p&gt;However, Ola is working on a language that learns from the expressiveness of Ioke but is a bit more practical. It&apos;s called Seph and is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seph-lang.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.seph-lang.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And, finally, a small story: I was spending a few nights a week writing Ioke and trying it out about a year ago. Ola spoke about Ioke at an internal company presentation (sort of a mini-conference) and afterwards I started to talk about the language with him and Brian Guthrie. We talked about the language constructions and how we solved problems in the language, etc. etc. Finally, I get around to asking the question, &quot;So, after writing Ioke for these past few weeks, I feel like I have no idea if I&apos;m writing idiomatic Ioke!&quot; Both of them look at me as if I&apos;m a crazy person and finally Ola smiles and says, &quot;There need to be more than 10 developers writing in a language for there to be idiomatic anything.&quot; Playing with these languages are fun but messy! Don&apos;t be afraid to make mistakes and just dive in.</text></comment>
<story><title>Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years</title><url>http://blog.fogus.me/2011/10/18/programming-language-development-the-past-5-years/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ehsanu1</author><text>fogus mentions OMeta, which is amazing in my own humble opinion. You can, extremely concisely, create a parser for a language you dream up. The author of OMeta has an example of parsing JavaScript in 200 lines of OMeta. OMeta can also parse itself in about 40 LOC. This conciseness is the reason Alan Kay&apos;s Viewpoints Research Institute is using it for their STEPS project (attempting a full GUI system from &quot;scratch&quot; in 20k LOC). They use it to compile all the languages in the project, and even make use of it in their 200 LOC TCP implementation.&lt;p&gt;The example gist provided really doesn&apos;t do it justice (partly because there&apos;s a variant with slightly lighter syntax). Check out the sandbox for OMeta/JS (there are several OMetas, each for its own host language), which has several projects you can check out: &lt;a href=&quot;http://tinlizzie.org/ometa-js/#Sample_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tinlizzie.org/ometa-js/#Sample_Project&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>