Background

Years ago, I began making a language called lin. Initially a weekend mini-experiment in designing a language that:

• was easy to program in.
• was easy to implement.
• incorporated design patterns from both practical and esoteric languages that I liked.

After a few years of hiatus, I revisited lin with a fresh mindset, fleshing it out significantly. However, this draft implementation became rather cumbersome, and I found that I was being bogged down by the growing codebase as well as Node.js as a language. Thus, I decided to wipe the slate and reimplement lin using a new language.

At first, I began the reimplementation using F# - flin. Creating interpreters using functional languages can be wonderfully convenient; I was able to let F# handle the lower-level mechanics like GC while I focused on reasoning out the higher-level abstractions. However, I found that the .NET ecosystem as a whole was relatively... unapproachable? Foreign? In any case, I switched to Scala, which provided the same functional benefits but with a subjectively more amenable ecosystem for development.

Motivations

I tend to think of sclin as a "fantasy-lang" that incorporates design features I like/want but may not necessarily be practical in a production environment. A few of these ideas include:

• APL/J/K vectorization
• Javascript type coercion
• A lot of concepts associated with functional programming languages in general

The challenge with sclin is to merge all of these potentially disparate features into a flexible design that can retain maximum expressiveness over a variety of programming paradigms.