this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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It really does mystify me what anyone thinks they're accomplishing by creating a brand new programming language these days. Other than a purely academic exercise, of course.
Whatever features you want your language to have, there's probably already a language out there that's damn close to it. And if your ideal language is just like some existing language except for a few niggling details ... then there's no need to start from scratch -- just make a modified version of that language with a few little changes to make it act the way you want.
Programming languages are just about a solved problem now, IMO. I can't imagine any scenario where creating a new language from scratch would be better than tweaking an existing language ... or just using an existing language as-is.
I want a language with an internal/core calculus of GRTT with a specific grading that I believe will provide both optimal evaluation and prompt resource release. You aren't going to get that by building on top of another language.
Of course you could do it as a library for another language, but the few values you could lift/lower and the necessary analysis do to bidirectional type inference/checking mean that you are writing a compile phase whether you call it that or not. In theory, you might save on the tokenizer/parser, but those are trivial to write. You might be able to reuse parts of the API/ABI, which could be an advantage if the underlying language has a good, stable one that can reflect your linking/calling/passing restrictions; but that's not likely.