Programming a language

• This is the companion article for this talk.
• The full code for this series can be viewed here.

In the past couple of years, I’ve had to implement two (very simple) programming languages for two different companies. I found the experience to be extremely fun, and have thus decided to study the subject a little more in depth - because yes, that is how a reasonable person does it: only after I’m done solving a problem (twice, no less!) will I study how one should actually go about it.

And since it’s a fun thing to study, I’ve started giving informal live coding sessions on the subject at work. This series will follow these sessions, as I find it a good and motivating way to prepare them.

• Introduction
• Representing source code
• Taking decisions
• Naming things
• Reusing code
• Repeating actions
• Identifying invalid programs
• Inferring types
• Enforcing typing rules in the AST
• Producing a typed AST
• Interpreting a typed AST