Home

Quench

A programming language. Goals/plans (in no particular order):

• scratch my itch to make a programming language
• garbage collected
• immutability
• steal Clojure's awesome philosophy of focusing on open data
• probably don't use namespaced map keys
• bless JSON
• refinement types
• make backward compatibility easier
• rapid code reloading development style, in the spirit of Common Lisp's REPL-driven development but without some of the drawbacks
• make package management easier
• target JavaScript so it can be used everywhere you'd want to use a garbage-collected language
• maybe figure out some way to do threads too
• tackle the tradeoff between abstraction and understandability
• make testing pleasant to do, while acknowledging the realities of testing
• allow reasoning about the world at multiple levels of certainty, as opposed to Haskell's blunt IO monad
• metaprogramming
• declarative, like Haskell's function declarations and unlike Lisps imperatively defuning
• easy to make tools for
• well-integrated with editors
• easy to try in the browser
• Linux scripting
• use generative property-based testing to fill in the gaps and help out the refinement type system

Other possible goals:

• bidirectional programming
• incremental programming
• make performance analysis easier?

Things that exist:

• differentiable programming
• probabilistic programming?
• the Unison programming language