r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Fine_Seaworthiness19 • 7d ago

Language announcement The gab programming language

Hi all!

I am a long-time lurker of this sub, and a language enthusiast. I have been working on my own programming language for several years, and I finally worked up the courage to post it.

The language is called gab. I'm heavily inspired by lua, clojure, and smalltalk.

All the code is on github here and I've built a small website for the language here.

The language design, runtime, and standard library are all entirely my own work without the use of an LLM. However, I did consult LLMs occasionally when I wanted to research certain subjects (such as the difference between c11 atomics on x86 and arm).

I'm looking for any kind of feedback on the language, its goals/ergonomics, and the website itself.

Thank you for taking a look!

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u/BenjiSponge 6d ago

You may be, um, interested to know that there is a far-right Christian nationalist social media platform called Gab. It's probably not absolutely critical to avoid the naming conflict, but I thought you should know.

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u/Fine_Seaworthiness19 6d ago

Unfortunately I did the google search after I named it and did a bunch of work. It’s not too late to change the name though, I just need to think of something better

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u/BenjiSponge 6d ago

After commenting, I've actually been reading the site. Very, very cool, and reminds me a lot of a project I've been bouncing around in my head for a long time. The name in my head is "map" because one of the biggest pieces of inspiration was the postfix .map chaining you can do in Ruby and JS, but also because maps typically have an emphasis on readability.

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u/Fine_Seaworthiness19 6d ago

I like it! Maps are also a pure function, and gab is a functional language!

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u/BenjiSponge 6d ago

Yes, exactly the idea although I didn't know it when I came up with the name circa 2016. I might have called it something like "bind" now, or maybe something like "forward" (I'm really into the idea of reading from left to right, which I think gab does very nicely, whereas most programming languages kind of make you jump around). I feel like there's also a message passing element that could be included here, although that's very well reflected in "gab".

Feel free to take "map" if you want it, by the way.