Hey everyone, thanks for the replies. I've been busy the past couple days and was also letting the thread soak a bit (i.e. get replies) before responding.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Thanks! I think there's a lot more untapped potential for programming language design that is on the horizon and I think that hypothetical combo of traits I mentioned is one particularly promising direction to explore in that respect.
I've even been contemplating the possibility of writing my own compiler off and on over the past few years, but I've never written a compiler before and indeed haven't even ever touched compiler code, though I have contributed to multiple new languages' documentation for such, since unlike many programmers I actually love writing documentation (or at least people tell me most don't like writing it).
However, there are multiple other project ideas I'm considering and which are arguably more likely to pay off (application ideas and game ideas) and I've also been waffling indecisively about language choice regardless of what I make (application, game, or language). These days it seems that C and/or LLVM (and outside of systems programming proper: other platforms like the JVM or .NET or JavaScript) are the most common backends for compilers, but I've been contemplating the possibility of diving in and making a transpiler (a.k.a. "source to source" compiler) that targets Free Pascal or some other target backend language on the basis that I'm not sure I feel like messing around with C and C++ more and want a cleaner experience and more pleasing and/or expressive coding feeling.
I actually like the syntax of Free Basic and Visual Basic and Ada more than Free Pascal's syntax in most respects (especially if the
if ... end if -like syntax were nearly/completely consistent like in Visual Basic .NET since I like it to be as easy to read code structure backwards as forwards), but Free Pascal seems to have a significantly more mature ecosystem and a
much better RAD IDE (Lazarus). I know people these days expect users to use the command line for programming, which works "fine", but I've long wanted a return to graphical installers and abundant little GUI tools for ease of use for end users on principle and the ability to produce good GUIs fast in that regard in Laz and FP would be a big asset. Other systems do have their own equivalents or at least good libraries and frameworks, so pros and cons as usual.
Have any of you attempted or completed a compiler that transpiles to Free Pascal or is at least implemented in it? If so, how'd it go? I am tempted to try potentially.
The past couple days I've been mulling over a few different strategies for what I could use if I write my own compiler:
- Use Free Pascal and Lazarus as both the implementation language and the target backend language. FP has a similarly broad range of target support as C, though a less certain future but still very solid and in the top most used languages still.
- Use Free Basic instead since it (from what I understand... I've not actually used it except to open it up a few times and browsed its docs) transpiles to C. That would feed my desire for a prettier syntax and aesthetic satisfaction more probably, though would perhaps be less pragmatic (except that FB has a few minor things done better than FP, such as macros and freedom from some of Pascal's historical oddities and restrictions and such).
- Use Chez Scheme or Gambit Scheme or Racket or some other scheme family language as both the implementation language and the target backend so that I have a satisfying feeling of building things up from elemental and elegant pieces. However, every time I look into this I start excited but then get put off by the awkwardness of non-bignum computing on these and the frequent occurrence that despite claims that these languages support full native compilation their actual docs and process often imply that that is not really fully true or is awkward (e.g. Chez Schemes application redistribution instructions in their manual are especially bewildering and make me feel uneasy about it). Scheme languages also say they support cross-platform but tentative my experience with that is that myriad things often seem to go subtly wrong in that regard, especially Windows support being basically broken the moment you try to do a real project that uses libraries. Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe there's a good Scheme-based approach. I'm not sure if you could even write an OS in Chez. Their docs potentially make contradictory claims regarding compiling independent executables, for example.
- Use a language that is well known for being used to write compilers, such as OCaml (e.g. the original compiler for Rust was actually written in OCaml before Rust eventually bootstrapped itself). OCaml has a mandatory GC though, unlike Free Pascal and Free Basic, and has other performance implications I'm not sure I'd want to be bound to if I used OCaml as not just the implementation language but also the target/backend language. I could target a different backend (like C or Free Pascal) while using OCaml's language-suited ecosystem for the implementation but I don't want to spread myself too thin regarding language use. Racket would be another potential language that could be good for processing text like a compiler. Likewise for Tcl/tk or Raku perhaps, though I've not used much of either.
- Use Lua for both the implementation and the backend and just accept the performance hit and limitations that this implies. I could use Love2D as a GUI system for this and treat that like it is the available platform. This would be a low burden approach but I'm not sure how I feel about the limiting aspect of using an interpreted and/or JIT language and the reduced access to low level constructs, etc. LuaJIT is fast though and reasonable comparable to managed languages like Java or C# and I like that Lua is not too ideological and is simple and has a small implementation (hence high survivability, especially with it being built on C).
Another language I've considered is Ada, but Ada has recently become frighteningly severely vendor locked by AdaCore (the main compiler producer). Much of the Ada ecosystem is dependent on AdaCore and they have basically
de facto turned the language into an extremely expensive proprietary language. They don't even tell you the price. They are one of those companies that require you to fill out an email forum to ask them for a quote (hence unbounded potential cost). The truly open source FSF version of Ada is reputably always far behind AdaCore's version and now AdaCore no longer offers free/community versions of their software. Ada has a much cleaner syntax than Pascal though while still having a similar feel. It's a shame that it's not a real option for open source anymore in practice, or at least I'm not willing to risk it.
Interestingly though, there's a new language called Mini Script that essentially feels like what would you get if Lua and Ada were mixed together. It has Ada-like
if ... end if style syntax that lets you read as easily backwards as forwards as you scroll through your code (like Free Basic and Visual Basic too) but has a small core similar to Lua's. The author of the language even says on their site that they offer small monetary grants to anyone who writes programs in it or publishes articles about it and so they are trying to promote it at least. It is also paired with the "Mini Micro", a "fantasy computer" in the similar vein/spirit as things like the famous Pico-8 and TIC-80.
Regarding mixfix syntax (allowing the user to define arbitrary phrases for functions and macros, instead of just single ASCII and underscore identifiers), I really think people underestimate how great it would be (and in fact is) for improving readability and natural flow of a language. Look for example at Jinx (a C++ based embeddable scripting language) for one of the cleanest modern examples I've seen of a simple mixfix language. I also hear that LDPL is another language that likewise allows or uses mixfix syntax a bunch, though I haven't looked into that one as much.
Also, regarding homoiconicity and elegance, probably the two most elegant-feeling languages I've played with are Factor (perhaps the most extensive and capable concatentative language) and Racket (or any other Scheme family language really). Concatenative languages like Forth and Factor have even less syntax than s-expression based (Lisp/Scheme family) languages but their "stack shuffling" requirements cause them to become less readable. Luckily, I've come up with a few creative ways of potentially greatly remedying the readability problems of such concatenative semantics and hence my comment about such in my mention of my "current vague programming language fantasy".
Oh, and technically I
do have a newsletter (on my static HTML site of the same name as my username) but I've never even sent a single message with it yet because I only a have a few members so far because it has become extremely hard to get human traffic in the modern web due (as best I can guess so far) mostly due to the automated plagiarism/theft/spam bots (so called "AI") running amok and search engines greatly reducing the visibility of independent sites and independent creators.
The plagiarism bots certainly constantly hammer even my tiny site though, downloading copies of my image files and audio files at least dozens of times per day (via apparently the same bots) redundantly over and over for months on end. I can't wait for the plagiarism and economic/intellectual/creative parasitism of these "AI" trends to blow up in the faces of the developers and users of such and to finally mercifully end. I am really hoping to see the trend (more aptly perhaps: the Faustian bargain) end or greatly diminish as soon as possible. The future is in firmly opposing such inherently unethical behavior in tech, not supporting it. It's the worst thing to ever happen to the computing industry
by far. I never even would have guessed (if you asked me years ago) if tech would ever sink so incredibly low and become so unethical as to essentially just rob the rest of all of humanity of their labor and creativity and so glibly and routinely violate everyone's personhoods and yet here we are. It is really absurd.
Even these forums themselves are evidently (like practically all independent forums lately) getting hammered by the plagiarism/theft/spam bots constantly lately. It's been almost unusable today. I've seen lots of webmasters talking about getting crushed under the weight of the bot traffic lately. Even more broadly speaking, sociopathy in generally has been really out of control in society the past few years and it really shows very strongly in these artificially engineered "AI" trends especially. It has truly become a blight on society and endangers the future economic/creative/intellectual freedom of all of humanity, frankly. There's nothing I hate and want to see obliterated more than these plagiarism and theft bots that they've dubbed "AI" mostly just to mystify and misdirect people as to the true nature of what they really are (the "tech" is essentially just an elaborate automated plagiarism and randomized/transformed IP disguise system).
They ("AI" developers) can mask the plagiarism behind a variety of transforms, but are often caught stealing things almost verbatim regardless. Even the famous example of an "AI" supposedly "hallucinating" when it suggested putting glue in pizza in a recipe someone requested turned out to be taken directly from a Reddit post where someone was joking about doing exactly that. There is no credible evidence any of the "AI" has ever exerted any real creativity or thought of their own whatsoever in reality. The "AI" bots primarily just steal people's work and then randomize/transform that work using a very wide ranging variety of methods and techniques but the underlying plagiarism is
by far the most dominant factor. It is essentially just a glorified copyright laundering system.
I even saw one produce an image that was almost identical to an image painted by someone who literally
sat next to me in art class in college many years ago and who I saw paint it. By plunging independent creators off the web (hiding our websites and minimizing individuals' social media reach) and making most independent thinkers and creators nearly invisible and then combining that with automated plagiarism tools ("AI") the big companies are able to collectively steal people's time and labor across the entire internet with impunity (and also suppress future social movements of any kind) knowing that people will hardly ever see the (now deliberately very hard to find on the internet) original works of independent creators (of all kinds: artists, programmers, musicians, authors, etc) from which it was stolen. Thus, the bots hammering all of these sites and forums (like these forums and countless others) in a vigorous effort to disempower the public and anyone who isn't a giant company as much as possible... Indeed, I would give almost anything to not feel like I'm constantly being violated and data-scrapped on the internet like in the past few years. It really demotivates such things and forces a very defensive posture by necessity upon anyone who has any self respect and isn't naive. It has truly drained the color and joy out of so much of the tech world and all we get in return in spam and the greatest theft act of human labor and largest violation of digital human rights in all of human history. This is despite us already having far too much content before this even started. Such fun...
Anyway, putting the previous dark tangent/rant aside, it sounded like you potentially wanted me to say more stuff so that you could have more prospective interesting thoughts and ideas to bounce off of and so there you go! I hope at least some of it was of interest or use to you and the other respondents here.
I especially recommend checking out Mini Script, Jinx, Racket, and Factor (some languages I mentioned before) if some of what I said for hypothetical language ideas interests you. Seed7 is also another good example. It is kind of Pascal-like but with partially customizable syntax and quite a few other interesting quirks. None of these languages are what I have in mind as a fantasy programming language, but they each touch on some aspects of what I said at least in part. I have an idea (among many other things) on how to create a concatentative language that is very readable and does not require stack shuffling and its associated cognitive overhead but still has similar concatenative properties and could be made to resemble natural language pretty closely while still being precise. I'm tempted to work on such a compiler at some point but still trying to settle one how to approach it or even if I should given how I need to find more sustainability in my programming.
Has anyone here worked on compilers and have thoughts in that regard?
Feel free to comment on anything else too of course, anyone. (Heads up though: I am vigorously 100% anti-AI though and you can't expect any sympathy whatsoever from me for any defense of it, especially not regarding any form of saying it is "just a tool" or anything other fallacious or rhetorically disingenuous sophistry or any rationalizations for dehumanizing others for the mere sake of the convenience of being able to steal their work and violate their digital personhood non-consensually in aggregate through automated means.)
PS: My post got more verbose and tangential than I planned, but hopefully that will not be a problem. More info provides more opportunities for further richness of thought and tangential discussion for all participants after all, etc. Freedom requires a rich landscape of possibilities and its my philosophy to embrace that vigorously and ethically. Minimalism and centralized control and other destructive forces in tech may be at their zenith (their greatest height) in recent years but I suspect the pendulum may "soon" (relatively) swing the other way again and ethics and maximalism and the end of "move fast and break things" as tech's
modus operandi will hopefully come on the horizon. I certainly am eager for some significant changes in the tech landscape and I think recent tech company behavior will ironically bring about their own partial demise or partial collapse and will motivate change in the tech world at large back towards more ethical behavior and less dark patterns and less pervasively destructive exploitation and so on.
"Thank you for coming to my TED Talk" (or alternatively: "Thanks for reading my book")... heh... I'm done ranting now.
I'm still contemplating what the best strategy is for applications and/or games and/or a potential new language compiler. Laz and Free Pascal are great candidates in that regard, hence me being here.
Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful day/night/week/weekend/etc!
Recent
