Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

Considering my fondness for language bashing (particularly, when it comes to such little programming gems as Perl, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, Modula-2, Ada, Haskel, CAML to name a few that I think are terrible) I decided that if I'm going to have an opinion of a language, I'd better be able to back up my position (aside from the typical "X is better than Y because of feature Z").

To that end, I've undertaken writing my own simple scripting language, called YoctoScript (yocto being prefix for extremely small unit of measure, 10^-24). I went more with the original REXX model where everything is a string and no objects/classes. I won't extend this scripting language to include more data types and object support - this is purely a learning sandbox so that I can hone my parsing skills in preparation for other languages, of which I have 2 in mind

1. ProVerb (Programming Verbose) - an OO programming language containing virtually no "symbols" (except for obvious places like mathematics); I want mulitple inheritance and enclosures (perhaps in the form of anonymous functions as JavaScript does it) as key features.
2. Pedantic - esoteric language which contains virtually no keywords, a small set of instructional symbols, but provides a function declaration structure which allows for virtually unlimited extensions to the language; not even simple "if" instructions are to be hard-wired into the language.

Since I'm a Java programmer at heart, these will all be JVM-based languages.

The first thing everyone asks me is - what's the point? With so many programming languages and environments, why add more? My answer is purely that I want to know as much about the inner workings of languages that I can critique from a position of knowledge, not ignorance or fan-boy status. These aren't intended as languages to replace existing ones; there's no niche I wish to fill; there's no financial gain I am seeking.

I will make all these languages publicly available so that if anyone is interested they can have a peek and perhaps learn something new themselves.