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designing programming languages

Recently, I stumbled on the Io programming language. It’s a cool language, primarily because of its elegant simplicity. In fact, the entire website of the author is quite interesting and similarly elegant through simplicity, as his quotes page suggest not entirely by accident.

Although I cannot find the web links that brought me from one to the other, reading about this language made me read briefly about an older language under the same name, Io, of which the only main presence is a reference to it in Raphael A. Finkel (1995), Advanced Programming Language Design, which turns out to be a freely available book with really very interesting content. So, the last few days I have been reading the first couple of chapters from this book.

Stumbling from one interesting site about language to another, I just now stumbled on this description of the Q-BAL programming language. A language designed purely for fun, not for any practical use, but it’s pretty cool, again due to its simplicity, but also because of its twist of thinking in terms of queues instead of stacks.

All this is obviously distracting me from more urgent work / research, but it is pretty interesting reading. So many programming languages in the end look so similar, either object-oriented or imperative with very little variations, that it is refreshing to read more about how functional language work or what kind of other variations one can think of.

Add comment May 30th, 2008