So, you want to design your own language? (2017)
30 comments
·November 15, 2025librasteve
I would like to see Raku (https://raku.org) at least mentioned in the list of languages to be aware of. Why?
- Raku has built in Grammars so it is a great place to do early iteration of your parser
- Raku is objects and type classes all the way down (as explained here https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda89296 )
- RakuAST development is well advanced (use v6.e.PREVIEW) with the Slangify module to accelerate development of sub languages (Slangs)
adzm
For some reason https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda892... wasn't a link in your comment but it was a great read
xfeeefeee
For those unaware, Raku is the evolution of Perl 6, basically. It's honestly a beautiful and seductive language. At the same time it terrifies me.
librasteve
The main idea of renaming from Perl6 to Raku was to allow this beautiful and seductive new language to escape the black hole gravity well formed by the collapse of the Perl star. Seems like Raku is stuck inside the Perl event horizon for ever, with no hope of reputational escape.
silisili
Great analogy, and similar to how I saw things play out.
IIRC Perl 6 wanted to expand or morph into something better, spent a ton of time on it, and the community in general rejected it hard.
So now we have this dangling language that's shunned by its own community, regardless of its merits. Weird place to be in.
didierbreedt
I’m waiting for a llm focused language. We’re already seeing AI is better with strongly typed languages. If we think about how an agent can ensure correctness as instructed by a human, as the priority, things could get interesting. Question is, will humans actually be able to make sense of it? Do we need to?
suddenlybananas
How could an LLM learn a programming language sufficiently well unless there is already a large corpus of human-written examples of that language?
nrhrjrjrjtntbt
LLM could generate such a corpus, right? With feedback mechanisms such as side by side tests.
tbossanova
So… llm learns from a corpus it has created?
fjfaase
Interesting page. The latest language I designed is an stack based intermediate language for a C compiler. Not realy intended for human usage, but readable in the sense that you can compare it with the original C code.
zkmon
What do these languages compile to? What's the build pipeline and runtime context?
imvetri
This talks about programming language.
Right question is to design own linguistic language common between computer and across human.
exe34
Marain
DeathArrow
I had some thoughts about designing a new language. However it's a huge undertaking and I don't know the answers to some questions:
1. Is there a need for the programming language?
2.If the answer to the previous question is yes, can I find enough people to help and enough resources?
3. If the answer to the previous question is yes, can we release a MVPin a reasonable amount of time?
4. If the answer to the previous question is yes, what is the chance it will gather a reasonable amount of users?
There are literally tons of programming languages that didn't make it. I wouldn't want to waste my and other people resources.
artpar
I made a language for using in another project, so I'll answer your questions
https://www.npmjs.com/package/wang-lang
- this new language looks and behaves exactly like javascript, except it doesnt have "eval" and "new Function", so it is CSP safe. That's the only difference. I wanted to execute dynamically generated code in chrome extension
- llm did most of the work of creating a nearley grammar and associated interpreter (whole thing is bundled, nearley is not a final dependency), elaborate tests make this quite sane to handle
- took me about total of 1 weeks for the initial mvp to try out, and then have been fixing bugs and inconsistencies with javascript behavior, about 1 day a month of effort
- mostly 0
The only reason to create was I couldnt find something similar and it was low effort thanks to llm
I also created another even smaller DSL you can say
https://www.npmjs.com/package/free-text-json-parser
It parses json embedded in plain text
Hendrikto
> safe
> llm did most of the work
> it was low effort
I really wouldn’t trust its supposed safety.
artpar
csp safe has a particular meaning associated it with. its not a "safe" language whatever that is. chrome webstore team is okay with it and serves my purpose. if you have submitted extensions to google chrome then you would know that any sign of "eval" or new Function in the code will lead to rejection.
lifthrasiir
"Just for fun" is always a valid default option. Though many authors don't stop there ;-)
yokljo
I think most popular languages were started as an experiment in some feature, or to solve a specific problem someone had. Those are good reasons to make a language. I see no reason to make a language just to take attention away from other existing languages. Instead, make a language so you can understand how to make languages. It is 100% doable by one person. It's fun and educational.
chistev
Sometimes it might just be a fun project to push yourself. Maybe such a complex undertaking can't be fun indeed lol
DeathArrow
My idea of for fun is to release something people will use. I have more fun if I work on something useful. For me is less the journey than the end goal.
I love working on software, architecture, design but only if I see some use.
Of course, for other people, the journey is more interesting than the destination and they have fun hacking stuff just for the sake of it. They discover things and learn new stuff they wouldn't have learned otherwise. And this is a path at least as valid as the other.
ModernMech
I'll try to answer your questions best I can.
1. Yes, as long as there are new machines that need programming, new programming languages will be needed. Today's top languages were built for the machines of the 1970, 80s, and 90s. Tomorrow's languages will be built for machines of today and tomorrow. As Alan Kay put it, if you want to invent a new language, first invent the machine of the future and then build a language for it.
2. No, you cannot. First of all, PL devs are cats, it's very difficult collecting them without financial compensation. So if your plan is to post a language and hope that people will come help you, you'll likely be disappointed. The problem is that everyone else interested in building PLs has their own itch to scratch, and they're not going to scratch yours without some compensation.
You might think "Well I can just raise money to do this", and you would be wrong. First, it's very hard to raise money for PLs. Usually you have to have come sort of cred to do it. I know of only 3 projects to have raised VC money for a PL project, and they each had some success before they had done so: Chris Granger (Light Table), Paul Biggar (CircleCI), and Chris Lattner (Swift/LLVM). Granger's project Eve raised $2M and ran out of money after 3 years; Biggar's project Dark also raised money, then fired all the devs when he realized he was burning cash too fast, then he slow-burned development for years, then he gave up and handed development over to someone else; and Lattner raised almost $100M for Mojo, which is probably going to end much the same way as Eve and Dark, but I wish them the best.
Anyway, the point is that you personally (no offense) don't have the profile to raise $100M like Lattner. $2M is not enough for a PL project. Lattner is keeping Mojo closed source for now because there's no good answer for how they're going to make enough money as an open source language to justify raising $100M.
And the reason it's so hard to raise money is because there's no money to be made. No one pays for PLs. No one pays for PL dev tools. They have to be open source or they're rejected by the dev community. The only ones these days who can reasonably pay for all of this with no potential revenue stream are giant corporations, who use the lang as a hook into their ecosystem.
3. Even though the answer is no, you yourself can still get an MVP off the ground in a pretty reasonable amount of time. It's never been easier to make a PL. The problem with PLs is building them is kind of like measuring the coastline; language projects are fractals -- there's an infinite amount of detail you can work on in any given direction. It's very easy for a language project to become a language + editor project, and it's easy for that to turn into language + editor + operating system if you're not disciplined. Plenty of PL devs have fallen into that trap.
4. Rounds to 0% chance. You'll be lucky if you build something that even you will use. Rather, most PL devs end up working on their language in some other language, because working on languages is what they want to do!
That said, it's still important to write languages that you understand no one will use. First it allows you to try new things that may good but unpopular. If PL devs only did what was popular with devs, PLs would go nowhere as a field.
Consider the so called "Hornet's nest" of programming languages [1], which is the tightly related cluster of imperative programming languages which have been the most researched and used over the last 50 years. There is a vaaaaaaaast design space outside that nest, begging for more language development. No one will use most of them, but it's important to understand what those languages might look like to maybe find some new ideas that work.
Also "didn't make it" is kind of an unfair judgement. Gaining popularity doesn't have to be a goal. In fact, it shouldn't be a goal if you want to have any fun at all. There's an infinite amount of work to be done, and if you're not doing it for you, you won't get far at all. That's really the only way to fail at this.
Good luck!
[1] https://tomasp.net/techdims/#footer=index,navigation;left=ca...
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dash2
This is bad and reads like AI slop. Try the "programming language checklist" instead.
andai
I can't comment on the quality (I don't know anything about PL design) but the page is older than LLMs.
http://web.archive.org/web/20170506182606/https://cs.lmu.edu...
I have to say that the 2017 version is a lot less intimidating though.
raincole
N=1: Skimmed through it and found nothing screaming AI.
almosthere
I think at this point we have to assume all articles are attempts to make some llm better, so they're spewing this shit out and if it gets a genuine reaction, we just gave the llm a rf-cookie. And if someone says "crap llm post" then it gets punished.
ModernMech
It's worth for this SnekQL mascot alone: https://github.com/jennashea/snekql/blob/master/docs/images/...
https://forum.rescript-lang.org/t/introducing-moonbit-and-a-... I happend to write a post sharing experience in building Rescript and MoonBit language