Original discussion in 2015, for those curious:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9901282" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9901282</a>
I hope that at some point language design will become a self-contained discipline.<p>It reminds me of back in the early days of the Internet when developers were the only web designers. Most programming languages are designed by the same people implementing them.<p>The common critique is that language designers might create a syntax incompatible with the limitations of the computer itself, but that’s the same challenge web designers had to learn in designing something that will look great in the constraints of the browser, and not just look good in Photoshop.
Yea. This page isn't about Designing a Programming Language. The page is about Implementing an Interpreter of a Programming Language without any actual design, just implementation.
The most important advice in my mind would be to waste as little time as possible on the parser; Forth is trivial, Lisp a tiny bit more involved.<p><a href="https://github.com/codr7/liblgpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/codr7/liblgpp</a>
One huge mistake admitted very early on: "Our".
This smells like design by committee. Or he thinks of himself like a kind of pope.<p>The most important point in designing a programming language is to avoid design by committee. Use a team for feedback, tests or docs. But nothing else. He didn't even mention that principle.