The Yin Programming Language

Introduction

I started to design a new programming language, which tries to solve the following problems:

• Most languages fail to learn from some historical mistakes
• Most languages have a religious following and an over-enthusiastic community, which prevents them from correcting their mistakes
• Some languages do too little for programmers, some languages do too much
• Some languages provide too little abstraction, some languages provide too much
• Some languages focus too little on usability, some languages focus too much on usability and not much on everything else
• Some languages learned too little from mathematics and logics, some languages learned too much
• Some languages infer too little about types, some languages infer too much

Solving these problems will need lots of inputs from programmers' experiences. You are welcome to follow my development and let me know your experiences and perspectives, so that I can make the best decision.

Current state

The language is in a design stage, so please don't expect it to be usable right now. Many design decisions are already made, but many still remain. If you want to learn how to design and implement a language, this might be a good place to look.

Implemented features

• basic types (integers, floats, arrays, records)
• primitive operators (arithmetic)
• first-class functions (closures)
• type system (incomplete)

Implemented facilities

• parser
• interpreter
• type checker

Still missing

• testing framework
• compiler
• runtime system

License (GNU AGPLv3)

Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Yin Wang

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.