I'm making a new programming language [loc-002G]

I've sketched out a design and begun implementation of a programming language, called Hito. Partly, this is just a programming exercise for me, but I also think the language might fill a niche that is currently unfilled.

Hito (from the Japanese pronunciation of the vaguely lambda-esque character 人, which also means "person"), is designed as a embeddable, lightweight scripting language that is purely functional. In particular, it's designed as an embeddable scripting language for situations where something like Lua even would be overkill. Often, full imperative procedures feel to me too heavy, but a language for quick specification of some calculations, formulas, pipelines or filters would be ideal. An example would be mark calculation formulae for a course gradebook. That said, the language is fairly extensible, so it could in theory be used for much more complicated applications.

I've nearly finished the first prototype implementation, which is written entirely in fairly clean, modern C. Primitive operations are pluggable, just as function pointers supplied to the runtime. It uses a simple mark-and-sweep precise garbage collector and a three-stack abstract machine design for executing the code. It will be dynamically typed, with support for pattern matching and a lightweight kind of algebraic data types, and higher-order functions and closures. The syntax is fairly clean, I think, and designed to be approachable to non-FP people. I have yet to make a proper website, but there is a code repository if you want to poke around.