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The Belle programming language

If I ever create a language, I will call it "Belle".

I had originally thought I would try to create a low-level language with capabilities similar to those of C++, but adhering to a more semantically meaningful design philosophy. However, I believe that Rust satisfies this niche quite well, and that the next area of language design that needs to be improved is in higher-level languages.

Design goals

Known goals

Currently... none. This repo is primarily for writing down any language design ideas that I have.

Possible goals

  • support the low-level control of memory management and stack/heap allocation
  • "don't pay for what you don't use" (a la Rust, C++)
  • Easier to read
  • Less typing
  • Better "default" behavior, generated code, etc
  • True "message-passing"
  • First-class support for managing synchronous or asynchronous control-flow
  • Re-evaluation of what "object oriented" means and what aspects are useful
  • Support for some functional-programming paradigms
  • Interactivity: not yet well-defined (see The Legacy of GOAL)
    • Quick compile times (at least for debug builds)
    • Built-in marshalling of executable code? This would be difficult or impossible in a multi-architecture system without JIT, which is probably contrary to low-level control goal
    • "Interactive" way to take a slow/dynamic program and incrementally monomorphize/optimize it?
  • Guarantees about functionality of debug vs release builds (may inhibit optimizations, but that might be a good thing)
    • Perhaps there would be an "intermediate" optimization level between debug and release that would perform all potentially functionality-changing optimizations (e.g. in C/C++, removing #ifdef _DEBUG/NDEBUG code and removing code paths with undefined behavior). Then the fully-optimized code should logically behave exactly the same way the intermediate build behaves.
  • Review Jonathan Blow's presentation about his desires for a new programming language

The name

My daughter's name is Annabelle, so the language is named after her. There are a number of secondary considerations:

  • I wanted a one-syllable easy-to-remember name

  • I wanted a name that was not already associated with a popular technology, especially another programming language.

  • I like the semantic association of "beauty," since I would like to create a "beautiful" language (in some intuitive sense--Ruby and Python are "beautiful" to me, while C++ and Perl are not).

  • I like the phonetic association with Bell Labs.

  • From Go To by Steve Lohr:

    > Belle was the first computer to attain the level of a chess master