About
There are many programming languages varying as much in usefulness or syntax as popularity, and yet somehow we’re still at it… still trying to figure out that one perfect language, or at least something closer to it.
Actually the problem is getting worse not better. These days we’re not just looking at one general purpose language, or even a couple of domain specific languages, but rather hundreds of languages, some integrated into a general purpose language, some not, some based on standardized representations (XML), and some using syntax from apparently nowhere in particular.
This blog is my attempt to understand the abyss and master it, helping you the reader while I’m at it, and perhaps even discovering a nugget of truth while I’m there.
To tackle any endeavour of this scope, the problem must be broken down. To this extent I’ve come up with a few major tasks involved with mastering the art of language design.
Learning what has already been learned, both by studying the design and gaining practical experience with as many difference languages as possible. Here the goal is to provide perspective, which can be applied to language design that may not be possible if one were to limit their knowledge to popular programming languages.
You also need some level of depth to help understand the more intricate issues with any single style of language, especially if you’re going to try to implement a dialect of that language or worse, are trying to merge ideas from it into a dialect of some unrelated language. For this I believe a combination of implementation and research is required.
So with this in mind, welcome to A Lexical Mistake, and I hope you enjoy the posts in the other sections.
– Lorenz