Lesson 1: Welcome & Overview

[sampsyo]

This is mostly an in-class discussion, but if you want, you can record your thoughts about what goes into a language implementation here.

[colinta]

Hey I'll bite! I just started the course, thanks to @surma for recommending it. He and I are both toying around with our own programming language.

So I'll answer from my own recent experience:

• first, there better be a goal, because really: do we need another programming language!? Probably not! But I couldn't find one that scratched my specific itch.
• inspirations: I think there should be a "family" of languages that you belong to. Otherwise you're building an esoteric programming language, ie deliberately unintuitive
• with those in hand, you can work on the spec: what does your language look like, how will it be tokenized/parsed
• maybe: reference implementation? This is the route I went – I could move quickly if I built it in TypeScript, but this does not feel like the destination, more of a stop along the way.