So You Want To Write Your Own Language

[Jakob Jenkov via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 24 December 2015 at 16:37:29 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> On 24/12/15 02:08, Walter Bright wrote:
>> This has resurfaced on Reddit:
>>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3xya5v/so_you_want_to_write_your_own_language/
>
> In the comments, about the cluttered syntax. For the 
> attributes, due to legacy reasons, it seems like D got all the 
> defaults wrong. System instead of safe, mutable instead of 
> immutable, not pure instead of pure and so on. We might not be 
> able to get rid of any attributes but if some of these defaults 
> were different perhaps it would not be necessary to use so many 
> attributes all the time.
>
> I know that many here don't agree but personally I think the 
> language could have less syntax it had AST macros. Some syntax 
> that is built-in now could be moved to library code in the form 
> of macros.


I think it depends a lot on your personal preference. For 
instance, I am always annoyed about immutable types being forced 
upon me (okay, they wouldn't be forced, but I'd have to work to 
get rid of them). I like mutable types.

Regarding the AST macros - I simply don't know enough about how 
that works in practice to have an opinion. Java doesn't have that 
stuff, so I don't know what I am missing :-)