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What I Leaned from Working on a Programming Language for 3 Years

Thursday, December 26, 2019

Corescript is a small "programming language" project I started in the summer of 2017. It was more of a hobby project that I made for fun rather than something somebody would seriously use. I worked on it until early 2019, abandoned it, then I started working on the Heb12 android app. The syntax for Corescript was meant to be very simple, and somewhat similar to MIT's Scratch.

This is a simple program:

var greeting = Good Morning
input name = What's your name?

print (greeting), (name)!

I thought this was the most simple way to write a program. It took some syntax inspiration from BASIC and Microsoft Batch.

Also, I had a very simple and easy way to interpret Corescript code. The code "print Hello, World" would simply be interpreted with code like this psudocode:

if line starts with "print"
   remove first 6 characters of line
   return

I know, it wasn't very efficient, but I made it work for a while. I also ended up writing many programs in Corescript, such as a text adventure, a calculator, etc. I have somehow not released these yet.

In January of 2018 I decided to re-write Corescript, again. This time I wanted to make it much more complex, with syntax highlighting, custom commands, and learn from the mistakes of my previous versions. Even now, over a year later, I still find it impressive.

New Plans For Corescript

Over the past year, I have been thinking of ideas for a new Corescript. First, I want to completely redesign the parser. It would still be similar to the previous versions, but allow for more complex features, like functions. I also would like to design it to also parse different languages. For example, a Corescript Spanish program could look like this:

imprimir Buenos Dias!
*Sorry about my bad Spanish

This program would simply print "Buenos Dias!". This could also work many different languages. I could also have a program to translate the programs from different languages.

I'm not sure when I will start working on this, but at the time I am busy maintaining Heb12 Mobile.

Why Corescript?

In 2017 I did a lot of searching to see if "Corescript" was taken. I couldn't find anything, with the exception of a Roblox CoreScript. But as far as I can tell, it just means a "Core" script. You could point to https://github.com/stephanbruny/corescript and say that I copied that, but that project started in February 2018, while my Corescript started in April 2017. If anything, they copied me (although I highly doubt it)

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