Introducing Mappy

During my nice little break last week I figured, why not? I'll make my toy programing language more real! The result is a functional programming language that is similar to Lisp, except maps (aka dictionaries, aka HashMaps, aka Hashes) are the core primitive, rather than lists.

You're probably thinking to yourself, "what's the point in yet another Lisp-like language?" Well, that's a great question! Mappy's really a breakable toy for my amusement (i.e. in its current state, Mappy's definitely not ready for production). That being said, here are some interesting design choices in the language

• I decided to go with maps rather than lists, because maps are more closely related to functions
• Keeping expressions simple and singular (a la Lisp) makes parsing and grammar rules trivial
• (Bias alert) Haskell is an amazing language in which to implement compilers
• I didn't want to implement if as a core primitive, so I had to choose between non-strictness and auto-closure function arguments (the latter won for simplicity reasons)
• Parsec and QuickCheck can really save you when you're trying to keep complex rules consistent (e.g. parsing)
• Github issues and milestones are an excellent way to break a problem into small chunks and really focus
• Implementing IO as a map has had constraining effects (no pun intended) that are similar to the IO monad

If you're interested in contributing, have a peek at the issues or feel free to play with it, see the README, and/or file some issues!