So you want to write your own language?

My unsolicited, biased advice: use s-expressions. Don't trigger a parse simply to compute with the sums of products and integers [0]. If you can think of something better than s-expressions use that. Also, read http://this-plt-life.tumblr.com/ and don't take yourself too seriously. Stand on the shoulders of giants and continue reaching for the sky. Languages are super fun. [0] http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mccarthy-elephant-2000

Alternatively, just write software in a Lisp variant (with good macros, clojure is quite meh here) or Ocaml or Haskell. These languages put you at the level of writing a language for each problem domain immediately and with a comprehensive and useful toolkit. These languages also do this while directly competing with all but the most carefully tuned of C++/C environments. Steel Bank Common Lisp and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler are good references here. These languages are often considered strange…

I've always found it unfortunate how he, and others, implicitly define the success of a programming language as its popularity. A programming language can be incredibly interesting and useful to you and others without ever becoming fashionable—and that doesn't mean it has failed! I think there should be other metrics for success: a programming language can be useful to a dedicated community of experts, it can be useful to a single company, it can be great for a single use-case…

These are good suggestions, Walter. Let me add a couple more. Always think of your language as a compiled language even if you start out just writing an interpreter. Otherwise you are likely to add features that are very difficult to compile efficiently. If you're trying to design a language for accessibility -- ease of use by relatively inexperienced programmers -- be aware of the tradeoffs. For example, weak typing, such as automatic conversions between strings and integers, is commonly…