Christoffer Ekeroth chreke.com

Little languages are the future of programming  ↦

Christoffer Ekeroth:

I’ve become convinced that “little languages”—small languages designed to solve very specific problems—are the future of programming, particularly after reading Gabriella Gonzalez’s The end of history for programming and watching Alan Kay’s Programming and Scaling talk.

Examples of “little languages” include SQL and regular expressions. In the old days we called these DSLs, but the author argues that term has become overloaded and I have a hard time disagreeing with that.


Discussion

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2022-11-22T03:16:43Z ago

In order to have a good experience with a language, not only does it help to get things done, but all the stuff around it like tooling, documentation, community, etc matter.

Question: How many prolog developers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: no.

Prolog has a special place in my heart, probably because I spent time with it in college, but it was extremely hard to debug. When you look at a language with similar characteristics, like polar, the language used by OSO, he comes with IDE tooling and better error reporting. That makes it much more approachable.

Indeed, building the tooling and integrating the tooling is getting easier with the advent of the language server protocol.

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