Designing a programming language is a huge undertaking. The last few days I have been thinking about types and classes and interfaces/traits and I got the feeling I was getting stuck in an analysis paralysis stage again. There is also lots of other questions I have to thinking about, such as: How will I handle mutability, and concurrency, and how those things interact? Can I add methods to classes at runtime? Can I implement interfaces to arbitrary existing types? How do I get a trait implementation 'in scope' / available? How static and dynamic typing will interact? How does this get implemented under the hood? And so on, and so forth…
At the same time, it may seem that not solving those problems undermine the whole point of designing a new language in the first place. If you don't solve the hard problems, why not keep using an existing language?
And that's the recipe for paralysis.
But the thing is, even if you solve part of the problems, you can already have something valuable. If Fenius 0.3 gets to be just a 'better' Scheme with nicer syntax and fewer namespacing problems*, that would be already a language I would like to use.
So what would a Minimum Viable Fenius need?
map, foreach, filter), that kind of thing.
\ at the end or ending a line with an infix operator).
These would go a long way already. These are all pretty doable and don't involve much hard thinking. The greater problems can be tackled later, after the language is usable for basic tasks.
I would also love to have basic sockets to try to write web stuff in Fenius, but these will have to wait, especially given that Chez does not come with sockets natively. Thunderchez has a socket library; maybe I can use that. But this will come after the items above are solved. I can write CGI apps in it, anyway, or make a wrapper in another language to receive the connections and pass the data via stdin/stdout.
Also, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be more profitable to implement Fenius on the top of Guile instead of Chez, since it has more libraries, and now also has a basic JIT compiler. But at the same time, the ultimate goal is to rewrite the implementation in itself and leave the Scheme dependency behind, so maybe it's better not to depend too much on the host ecosystem. Although the Chez compiler is so good, maybe it would make more sense to compile to Scheme and run on the top of Chez rather than compile to native code. If only it did not have the annoying startup time… we'll see in the future!
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* Of course, 'better' is subjective; what I want is for Fenius 0.3 to be a better Scheme for me.
Addendum: And by 'better syntax' I don't even mean the parentheses; my main annoyance when programming in Scheme is the syntax for accessors: the constant repeating of type names, like (person-name p) rather than p.name, (vector-ref v i) rather than v[i], (location-line (AST-location ast)) rather than ast.location.line, and so on. This goes hand in hand with the namespacing issue: because classes define a namespace for their methods, you don't have to care about name conflicts so often.
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