Talk:Programming Languages Diversity Project

Hello

Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I talked to @Hogü-456 at the WikiCon 2023 in Linz. Now I find the time to write it down. Some time ago, I tried to develop a kind of programming language for professionals with limited IT knowledge. Although it is not open source, I am happy to share some of my experiences with my first domain specific language. Currently I have limited capacity for wiki projects, but I hope this place will be suitable.

After investigating some already existing programming concepts I ended up with some domain specific language (in short: DSL) based on an already existing human-readable data serialization language. I tried to avoid the Halting problem with limiting the DSL to be not turing complete. For my purpose was it ok to lock down the language but for a real programming language it would not work.

Here are some lessons that I have learnt or that have been confirmed for me:

Involvement of the intended target group(s) is just as important as diverse and interdisciplinary teams
Exchange of experience with experienced creators of programming languages can be very helpful
Good theoretical groundwork helps, but clean technical implementation is also necessary

I started with a search for reference books and found the following:

Parr, Terence; (2010). Language implementation patterns / create your own domain-specific and general programming languages. The pragmatic programmers. Raleigh, NC [u.a.]: Pragmatic Bookshelf. ISBN 978-1-934356-45-6.
Fowler, Martin; (2010). Domain-specific languages /. The Addison-Wesley signature series. Upper Saddle River, NJ ; Munich [u.a.]: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-321-71294-3.

It is mainly about designing languages and building interpreters (and parsers too).

I also found it very interesting to look at different kind of programming (visual programming, spreadsheet, text based) and programming paradigms (e.g.: object oriented, imperative, functional).

Maybe the following tools are helpful:

Eclipse GLSP
Langium
the Parsergenerator Antlr and tools
- https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/tree/master/cobol85 (tried to be good readable for humans)
- https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/tree/master/lisp (compact but powerful)

Mr N (talk) 00:11, 29 December 2023 (UTC)Reply