Retrospective on Language Design

Abstract

In contrast to the list of languages I've designed, in this article, I talk about what it's like to design languages and what my thoughts on certain languages and the design process are.

Esolangs

Mostly I design esolangs, which, in a nutshell, are programming languages that were never meant to be. On the surface, they appear to serve no purpose. You wouldn't use one for writing a "serious" program like an operating system or a text editor or a web service — unless you were quite mad, of course. They aren't academic research as we know it, either, because they don't aim to tell us anything about how software engineering can be improved.

What they are, though, is highly entertaining — if you like that sort of thing — which many people do. If you're one of those people who likes programming per se, as a kind of intellectual challenge, then there's a chance you'll become good at it, and the possibilities presented by mainstream languages will begin to bore you. Solution? Try coding something in INTERCAL, brainfuck, or Befunge; and if those aren't weird enough for you, try Homespring, or Muriel, or Please Porige Hot. Guaranteed to not be boring. And when you're really ready to test your mettle, Malbolge will be waiting for you.

They are also things of beauty — in their own right — if you can see it — which many people can. They are works of art. But the medium of programming language occupies a fairly unusual aesthetic position; any program written in some esolang is also potentially a work of art, and the program which implements the esolang — the interpreter or compiler — might well be a work of art too.

Sometimes it seems like people sort themselves into groups based on these attributes. Some people like to write programs in esolangs (Brainfuck golf comes to mind,) some people like to design new and interesting esolangs, and some people like to implement esolangs. I am pretty squarely in the second group. While I am sometimes found implementing others' designs when they impress me, I generally lack the patience, concentration, stick-to-it-ive-ness, raw reasoning-inside-a-system ability, and quite frankly spare time it takes to puzzle together a working program in most esolangs. These days I find it quite challenging enough to merely compose example programs for my own esolangs.

Quantity...

I have, at this point, designed over 50 languages. Exactly how many depends on how you count. I don't consider Illgola-2, Illberon, or Open Sores Illgol## to really be different languages from ILLGOL — I've even gone back and forth on whether they should live in the same distribution or not. I don't consider Jacciata to be significantly different from Jaccia; and I'm not sure whether beta-Juliet and Portia should count as two. On the other hand, I do see Befunge-93 and Befunge-98 as being quite different, as are say Emmental and Mascarpone, and Arboretuum and Treacle. And when you get into language families, well, arguably Funge-98 only has 3 viable members, but there is really no limit to the number of Didigms there are.

Yet I do consider my cellular automata to be languages. Partly because some of them have roots in systems that were more clearly processor-, if not language-, like: REDGREEN is an adaptation of RUBE to CA, just as Braktif is an adaptation of Brainfuck, or Circute is an adaptation of circuitry. Partly because they are Turing-equivalent systems in which problems can be expressed and solved, just as they can in run-of-the-mill programming languages.

...and Qualities

However, I am not by any means the most prolific language designer out there. In fact, for sheer numbers, I seem to be in third place, behind Wouter "Aardappel" van Oortmerssen and zzo38. But sheer numbers aren't everything. Unlike zzo38, the majority of my designs have been implemented, and unlike Wouter, the majority of my designs and implementations are publicly available from my website.

So I might be led to consider other ways to measure my success as a language designer. What about popularity? Alas, it seems that I am third in that arena too; the inevitable roll call of canonical esolangs seems to be INTERCAL, then Brainfuck, then Befunge (see, even I followed that sequence, above.) But, perhaps we will find a measure which is subtler still, if we examine influence. While Brainfuck is the clear winner here, with dozens and dozens of descendants and variants both major and minor, (and yes, I have done a couple of these myself), I have the distinction of having several of my languages inspire designs and implementations and such by others, a fact by which I am flattered. For instance, Befunge-93 has been implemented dozens (maybe hundred) of times, and has influenced Blank, Befreak, PATH, and Aheui, among others; RUBE found its way into RUBE II, RubE On Conveyor Belts, and Rubicon; SMETANA inspired a FSM-completeness proof in the form of Smallfuck; and SMITH begat SMITH# and SMITHb. Even Xigxag seems to have attracted some attention (and shorter proofs than my own).

A Matter of Taste

What makes a "good" esolang? I'm not sure, but I have some opinions. For starters, to take Brainfuck and to replace each instruction with a different barnyard sound is... well, as Jeeves would say, I should scarcely advocate it. At the same time, I rail against the idea of reducing languages to "just semantics"; a delicate touch with the syntax is what makes a good language outstanding, esolang or otherwise.

Languages I design tend to fall into a couple of groups. One is the straight-up parody language, making fun of the absurdity of computer programming or some other ridiculous activity. ILLGOL is probably the canonical example, but HUNTER, 'N-DCNC, Jaccia and maybe Sbeezg count, too.

Another group are the "merely interesting" languages which don't really count as esolangs because they're just too normal, perhaps even attempting to solve a practical problem; this would include at least ETHEL, Bhuna, Iphigeneia, Arboretuum, Treacle, Dieter, and anything I design any time I start getting fed up with the state of modern mainstream languages and think I can do better. (I don't usually try to publish those.)

A third group is made up of "strange exercises"; languages which are designed around some principle which turns out to have unusal effects. This could include Sally, Larabee, Mascarpone, and Unlikely.

But probably my favourite design category is the "impossible language". Pick a combination of features which appears absurd and contradictory, like an Escher staircase or a de Chirico piazza, and in implementing it, tease out a labrythine connection which allows it to exist. Whether that be a machine language with no branch instructions — none at all — like SMITH, or a non-deterministic imperative language like Strelnokoff, or a conlang without word order like Opus-2, or a language with only infix operators but no precedence table like Hev, or a Turing-equivalent language with only foreach like Quylthulg, or a language with memory-mapped loops like ZOWIE, or a language where the only means of control flow is throwing and catching lexical exceptions like Okapi, or an imperative string-rewriting language like Pophery (under construction)... the results are usually highly entertaining.

What are my favourite esolangs, you ask? Well, the three I listed earlier (Homespring, Muriel, and Please Porige Hot) hold special places in my heart. The favourite esolangs of my own is a much harder question to answer. I will say that, in terms of striking a balance between "challenge to code in" and "beauty", I think Mascarpone is one of my best. That doesn't necessarily mean it's my favourite, though.

The Design Process

I should really say something about the design process itself. One thing I can point out is how long it typically takes to design a language; it's usually measured in years. It starts with an idea, of course. But ideas are a dime a dozen, and it's recognizing the good ones, the ones that fall in some relatively narrow zone between "too weird" and "not weird enough", that's the hard part. Then the challenge is not forgetting the idea, which usually means writing it down before your brain is engaged in other pursuits. Sometimes it comes back if you don't, but not always. Sometimes you can't reconstruct it from what you wrote down, either, but usually you can.

After the idea has proven promising enough to make it into the notebook, there comes a period of time known as development. The idea is almost never a full-formed language, so it must grow into one, although sometimes it never reaches that stage. This is actually why I try to implement my designs whenever I can; implementation fleshes out the grey areas and lays bare any places where the design falls apart. It usually leads to a more solid theme or paradigm inside the design, too, as the implementation phase generally alternates between (re)implementation and (re)design.

And this process, as I said, takes years. This is largely because I hold down a full-time job and spend much of my time maintaining a household too, so there is a tight limit on the amount of time I can spend. It is also largely because at any given time I am working on a dozen different designs "breadth-first", and must split my attention between them. However, there is also something to the idea that a design must age, like wine, to be really good. If the small amount of initial work I may have done on something still interests me a year later, I have a better feeling that it is worth finishing. Also, many designs accumulate small changes over time as I look at them from different angles, while others are simply difficult to fully conceive or implement — Burro and Okapi come immediately to mind.