I’ve been working on a statically typed concatenative programming language, Kitten[1], off and on for a few years now. I plan to do an early release this year.
I started working on the language to bring an elegant compositional style to low-level high-performance programming, in the form of a simple language that admits powerful tooling for program editing and visualisation. I also wanted to address usability concerns with stack-based languages (e.g., by allowing infix operators). As I’ve spent time in industry, I’ve begun to treat it as a way to address my gripes with C, C++, and Haskell; and as I’ve learned more type theory, I’ve begun to use it as a playground for type system research.
The goal is to allow pure functional programming that “feels imperative”, with a simple performance model (unboxed values by default, in-place updates, no laziness) and minimal runtime support (no GC, eventually no libc).
The latest compiler is nearly complete, but not yet usable for real programming. Still, you may like to keep an eye on its development.
Oh, it's good to see you. I'd like to say that I'm "following" (mostly limited to looking at the kittenlang.org every couple of months, but still) your project and I'm quite interested in it.
After learning about concatenative languages a couple of years ago I started learning Forth and later Factor. I wanted to give Joy a try, but IIRC I couldn't make it run and, after that, I stumbled upon Cat. But Cat was written for .NET and unmaintained (I just checked and it looks like even cat-language.com is dead now...). Still, I thought the idea was very interesting, at that point I was kind of tired of Forth strictly untyped nature. And then finally I found Kitten, which I thought was very promising, however very incomplete at the time. This is how I ended with Kitten being on my list[1] of languages to keep an eye on.
I hope it goes well and you'll release as planned, I can't wait to start playing with it! :)
I guess it’s still in a “promising but very incomplete” state. Lately I have a pretty clear sense of how I want the language to be, and people seem pretty excited about it. It’s just a matter of finding the energy to do the work…
Also, follow the repo if you want updates. The website hasn’t been updated in like 2 years, and probably won’t be until I need to prepare for a release.
I started working on the language to bring an elegant compositional style to low-level high-performance programming, in the form of a simple language that admits powerful tooling for program editing and visualisation. I also wanted to address usability concerns with stack-based languages (e.g., by allowing infix operators). As I’ve spent time in industry, I’ve begun to treat it as a way to address my gripes with C, C++, and Haskell; and as I’ve learned more type theory, I’ve begun to use it as a playground for type system research.
The goal is to allow pure functional programming that “feels imperative”, with a simple performance model (unboxed values by default, in-place updates, no laziness) and minimal runtime support (no GC, eventually no libc).
The latest compiler is nearly complete, but not yet usable for real programming. Still, you may like to keep an eye on its development.
[1]: https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten