Tom ForsythIt is spooky how much @rygorous and I agree on so many many things. So in lieu of me making a video of my ramblings, watch his instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBhT7nbWpMg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBhT7nbWpMg
YouTube
Fabian talked some about how languages are fundamentally tools, and they're all flawed, and no one language will solve all problems. And I absolutely agree. Some people spend a lot of time creating new languages, and I'm just not sure it's productive.
✧✦Catherine✦✧@TomF I think there are a few different schools of PL design that sometimes have little to no intersection:
- the researchers (we want to test this one cool concept, but it requires the rest of the language to exist, so here it is, i guess)
- the pragmatists (doing these few things is going to be really painful in our platform/environment/system, so let's make something that isn't)
- the reframers (approaching these tasks in this manner is usually a source of problems later, so let's make it painful in exchange for less pain elsewhere)
- probably more
personally, i'm partial to all three (i like rust because it does all of those things! and because i'm tired of writing embedded C) but the third one is my home domain. i want to build towards better ways of thinking, which coincidentally involves a lot of programming language development. but i also do this with libraries, it's not really essential that it's a language
@whitequark I don't think people SHOULDN'T develop languages. Hobbies are great! I just worry that too many people delude themselves into thinking they're doing something useful. No! Fun first! Always! Useful is a delusion sent to enslave you.
@TomF I don't disagree in principle but you're talking to someone who was hired as a junior webdev for the second real job and immediately went "I'll make a programming language to solve this problem!" and everyone genuinely loved the result (which did solve business objectives)
then I did it two more times or so
@TomF is it possible to be a professional language designer? Yes, evidently!
desirable? matter of taste
desirable? matter of taste
@whitequark See it's people like you and Brendan Eich just pied-pipering the innocent children away to your fantasy land of language designers from whence they will never return.
James Widman@TomF @whitequark imo all the language creation of our lifetime is pretty much an unavoidable symptom of the fact that digital electronic programmable computing machines are still so extremely new that we're not yet (& can't be) good at reliably making them refrain from doing things that we don't want them to do.
like, choreographic programming languages are only a few years old, and they dramatically improve the chances that a distributed system will behave correctly:
https://decomposition.al/blog/2025/12/30/interpreters-everywhere/
@TomF @whitequark then there's the fact that we're still getting new uarches that rule out categories of incorrect behavior (well, at least one, namely Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI)). and i don't know if the languages we have now can make the best possible use of the guarantees provided by those new or future uarches. to give ourselves the best odds of finding languages that do, it would help if we had plenty of people who practice language design & implementation.
@TomF @whitequark that said, if your main interest is making games rather than non-game software, then i'd mostly tend to agree with you. (Though, even for games, it seems like you'd want funding to put _someone_ on the task of making a language & tooling for type-safe render pipeline code.)