I wonder if my intuition here is correct; I would posit that “PL implementation” is a far more popular and well-explored field than it seems. How many toy/small/labor-of-love langs make it to Show HN? How many more simply don’t?

I’ve never personally caught the language implementation bug. I appreciate your perspective here.

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3371 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I totally agree, and I was fully aware of how common people make language for fun when I replied.

But I feel like the rationale would still stands: Considering LLMs' natures, common boilerplate tasks are easy because they can kind of just "decompress" from training data. But for a new language design, unless the language is almost identical to some other captured by the model, "decompression" would just fail.

	▲	tovej an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As someone who has implemented a fair few DSLs, lexical and syntactic analysis is pretty much the same anywhere, and the structure of the lexer/parser does not really depend on the grammar of the language. And even semantic analysis is at least very similar in most PLs. Even DSLs. Assuming you're using concepts like variables and functions. When it comes to codegen / interpreter runtimes, things start to diverge. But this also depends on the use case. More often than not a DSL is a one-to-one map to an existing language, with syntactic sugar on top. I'm curious, what's the DSL you're working on?