Lots of Little Languages: how to think better‘programmer thoughts’

Dr. Ian Piumarta, Viewpoints Research Institute, USA

Abstract: Edsger Dijkstra once said: "The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities." When we write programs, the single most important tool we use is a programming language. When we become fluent in a programming language, we end up thinking our data structures and algorithms in it -- directly.
　Unfortunately there is no such thing as a programming language that is good for everything. In our lives as programmers, we will inevitably encounter problems for which a natural and elegant language has not yet been invented in which to express a solution. We then have a choice: either think poor thoughts in a‘general purpose’programming language, or invent a new language in which to think much better thoughts. Which option we choose can mean the difference between a successful project and a failed project.
　In this talk I will show that inventing a new language, and then embedding it in an existing ‘general purpose’language, can (and should) be a commonplace tool for any programmer. The‘meta’tool we will use is the Parsing Expression Grammar -- a particularly simple and easy-to-use‘little language’for describing programming languages. We will see how it can be used to make several useful‘little languages’ embedded in a general purpose language, including (of course) itself.