The Siren Song of Little Languages

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2025-01-10 14:00:07

Some programming languages languish due to obscurity. They lack breathless blog posts exclaiming how much nicer they are to use.

Other languages are too ambitious. They aspire to support so many features that the original implementers struggle to get a first version working. For example, the type system in Fortress required constraint solving which took exponential time.

Sometimes a usable language struggles simply because it’s too much fun to write your own. Developers end up building their own implementation rather than actually using the language.

The most obvious implementation-focused language is BF. Despite having many implementations, BF programmers have to encourage the implementers to actually try using the language!

Scheme is also susceptible to this. Wikipedia lists 31 different Scheme implementations, not to mention the many toy implementations. Writing a Scheme is a great introduction to interpreters, especially once you get beyond the minimal lisp featureset. I’ve certainly written more implementation code than Scheme code.

The problem seems to be languages with a small, well written specification. Shen is a multiparadigm lisp defined in terms of an elegant base language with only 46 system functions. This has resulted in a remarkable 15 third-party implementations, but only a small number of libraries implemented in the language.