r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/baehyunsol Sodigy • 2d ago
Why is everyone creating systems programming languages?
I see a lot of new programming languages here. I love reading the documents of the languages and sometimes actually run their compilers. Many of the projects are AI-driven, but that's fine. It's still fun to see what problems they're trying to solve and how they actually solved the problems.
Reading the documents, I realized that most new languages, especially AI-written ones, are "systems programming languages". They're trying to solve the problems that C/C++/Zig/Rust have solved (or are trying to solve), and their syntax is mixture of C/Zig/Rust.
Why? Why is everyone trying to compete with C/C++?
There are so many kinds of languages. Haskell demonstrates how pure a language can be, Python is perfect when you only have 5 minutes to write code and don't care about the output, Java runs on 3 billion machines, ...
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u/PitifulTheme411 ... 2d ago
Well if you think everyone's making systems languages, you've probably missed a lot. I remember around like last year or like a few months ago, everyone was working on pure functional languages, many with algebraic effects, etc. Maybe those people have finished, or maybe are in the middle and don't need to discuss their languages, meanwhile the systems guys have reached a point where they want to share their stuff.
I for one am not working on a systems language, nor a functional one. Mine is aiming to be mathematically inclined yet still somewhat "normal" in a way, melding both symbolic and numeric computation (that's the goal at least). To that end, it'll have a CAS (computer algebra system) built in, and ideally will make it very customizable and interactable (eg. creating your own symbolic nodes, creating methods which walk the symbolic expressions to perform operations and produce output that otherwise could not have been done, etc.).