I would guess that the decision to create a small special purpose language or use an existing general purpose language is one of the toughest decisions that anyone facing the need for a new language must make.
Every market we go to, we have a domain-specific language. Every domain-specific language, underneath, has an architecture.
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.
My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.
Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.
No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.
[Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.
Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.
To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.
Stronger together is, I think, a preposition and a comparative adjective, but it's not really an action verb or what it is.
The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.
I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.
Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages.
Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
