Designing a language

Published on Wednesday, June 7th, 2017


I've been meaning to write this for a long time, but for various
reasons, I've never been satisfied with what I'm trying to say.
I always end up with a boring, meandering shit-heap of a text.
So I'm just going to put it out there: I'm designing a language.

Madness! Idiocy! Foolishness! What could possible be gained from
this? Well, fun, I guess. It's also an amazing laboratory for
playing with various ideas and gut-feelings I have related to
everything from hacking to software engineering.

I never intended the language to become public, but I have a
heap of texts that I think would be nice to share. I felt that
I needed some background as to why I've been exploring the topics.

I'll write up a proper synopsis on the language along with a few
ideas that I want to explore in particular soon-ish. Until then,
here's a few points to whet your apetite:

 * It is a lisp-1, like Scheme.
 * There is a functional interpreter for a subset of the
   language written in Common Lisp.
   - It's also written in a continuation-passing style.
 * It has first-class macros.
 * It has first-class continuations.
 * It supports lexical and dynamic scoping within a single
   environment.

<3 jzp