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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I've written about what I call "Tooling for Tooling", stuff like the LSP or tree-sitter that make it easier for language authors to build out their tooling ecosystem. I wish people invested more into these sorts of projects so we could raise the standard of tooling for everyone.

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I felt like a danged genius when I got a competent Rust writer at work to help me put the Elm LSP or tree sitter or whatever it was to work in Difftastic. Standing on the shoulders of a few giants at the same time.

Yeah, as someone who's actively building a language right now, I can attest that the process is rough. Rough in the sense that I need to invest heavily into putting together my own set of tooling. It's a non-trivial exercise, to say the least.

Why are you creating a language? There aren't enough good ones out there to cover your use case(s)?

Not who you asked, but for me (I use a custom language for work) it was a matter of being able to do what I wanted, in the way I wanted. The other added benefits were I could ensure that code I wrote for clients and for my employer met the ethical and professional obligations that I incur as an attorney. The only downside (according to others) is that my language implementation belongs to my employer, the theoretical foundation and language definition are owned by me. Overall, I feel more productive and I feel like the value I deliver is greater than it would be in another language.

Please tell me you called it legalese.

Jokes aside, that’s a really interesting use case. I’ve often wondered how laws, and changes to them over time, are recorded. It seems like the kind of thing that could be made more efficient with a formal syntax along with version control.

I now regret that I didn’t have that thought myself. As to the encoding of laws formally, I know there are some existing attempts to achieve that, but that type of thing doesn’t really apply in my line of work. I do however have a database version of the statutes that keeps the textual history and is searchable implemented.

Looking at his Github he seems to be creating a programming language for UI designers.

Thanks, yep that's exactly what I'm doing.

Why not? It’s fun and a cool exercise. It’s like writing songs. They may not be hits but they can still be fun to make.

Yep, I'm trying to build a language that allows UI designers to express their design decisions: https://matry.design

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