Top 3 themes from the discussion
| Theme | Supporting quote |
|---|---|
| 1️⃣ Creating a language is easy to start but becoming truly useful demands massive, sustained effort | “Programming language development isn’t necessarily about being a genius but rather a willingness to put in a monumental amount of work… Specification, implementation, documentation, diagnostics, optimization, configuration, tooling support, and creating a standard library … will mire you in many hundreds of hours of work.” — applfanboysbgon |
| 2️⃣ Often existing languages or libraries already solve the problem; a new language only makes sense if there’s a genuine gap | “If someone smarter than me didn’t think to invent a new language to solve what is likely a common problem, the solution already exists.” — wildzzz |
| 3️⃣ Practical implementation concerns (e.g., simple parsing, sandboxing) often outweigh language design ambitions | “You do not need all this ceremony. A recursive descent parser that uses Pratt parsing will work for a vast majority of cases.” — sieve |
These three themes capture the prevailing attitudes: the allure of building a new language, the heavyweight commitment required to make it viable, and the pragmatic reality that many of the same goals can be met with existing tools and languages.