I think pretty much every programmer (every computer scientist?) dreams of one day writing their own totally awesome programming language. I know I have wanted to do it for a long time. But it’s such a pain…I mean, you have to write grammars and parsers (lexers, too, maybe) and intermediate languages and compilers and maybe a virtual machine to run it on…it’s quite a lot of work and headache.

But then I saw _why had all of a sudden written his own little language called Potion and I became really jealous. I wanted my own little language, too! It wasn’t fair :(

So I caught the bug. Seriously. The language implementor bug. The stars had aligned just right, though. I knew about PEGs from a class I took last year and Alessandro’s Ometa. I had heard of TreeTop, which is a PEG generator for/in Ruby. After a quick look around I saw the Neko VM, which provides a high-level language for…well, implementing languages. Then it compiles down to its own byte-code and runs on its own little VM.

With these tools in hand (and my vague memory of a compilers course), I have been working feverishly on a little language I am calling Brat. Why “Brat”? Because it’s a language for people who don’t like their language getting in the way of doing whatever they want.

So far, I have some basics implemented, like objects and methods. It’s sort of an object-oriented prototyping dynamically typed something or other. I guess I don’t really know.