So, you want to design your own language?

Summary

Language Design So, you want to design your own language? Of course you do. Or perhaps you are taking a class and are being forced to create a programming language under penalty of a bad grade. What kinds of things do you need to know? Designing a Language Of course you want to design (and implement!) your own programming language! It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s empowering. How do we do it? In a nutshell, the process is iterative, cycling between four phases: Doing the phases over and over is important; for example, while writing the compiler, you may be like “woah this is impossible” and then realize “oh shoot this part of the language wasn’t designed right!” Prerequisites It helps to be experienced. If you’re not, that’s okay, actually—you might get lucky! But don’t mistake creativity for luck that shows up without pre-existing knowledge. The most creative people are those with a lot of knowledge and experience. So you should still study and practice! Your success as a language designer will be massively aided by knowledge in three main areas: Programming Paradigms. You should know a number of different ways that computations can be structured. These include: imperative declarative structured object-oriented functional applicative concatenative logic protocol-oriented aspect-oriented array event-driven dataflow agent-based etc.See Wikipedia’s list of programming paradigms. Programming Language Concepts. You should have a good sense of most, if not all, of the following things: Sequencing, conditional execution, iteration, recursion, functional decomposition, modularity, synchronization, metaprogramming, binding, scope, extent, volatility, subtyping, pattern matching, type inference, closures, prototypes, introspection, instrumentation, annotations, decorators, memoization, traits, streams, monads, actors, mailboxes, comprehensions, continuations, wildcards, promises, regular expressions, proxies, transactional memory, inheritance, polymorphism, parameter modes, typ...