Introducing: Project Effes

As I was just saying, the primary goal of this blog is to talk my way through my pipe dream of a new language. I'm calling this language Effes, for a couple of reasons. The language will be functional, and it'll be geared towards scripting rather than hard-core, general programming. F, S... "Effes." It's also the Hebrew word for zero, which is about how far I can reasonably expect my new language to go.

The world already has a bazillion programming languages, nearly all DOA. I expect mine to join that list; in fact, it'd be a major accomplishment if it were even significant enough for someone to add it to such a list. So then, why the hell?

• It'll be fun.
• I'll need to implement it in some other language (at least at first?), and that will give me an excuse to try out Haskell or Scala. Or both?
• I think I have some neat ideas, and I want to try them out
• There's some semblance of a need, in that I'm not really thrilled with any of the current options for scripting. At least, not the ones I know of.

Those points are ordered pretty much in descending order of validity. Working on a project just because it'll be fun, well, nobody can argue with that. Thinking I'm going to actually solve a slightly-annoying problem is pretty wishful. But hey, why not.

Besides which, anything I come up with can't be uglier or slower than Ruby, right? No, but seriously.

In the next few blog posts, I'll describe some of those neat ideas I have. We'll see if this blog gets any further than that. I'll also throw in a rant about Optional<T> in Java. How's that for a teaser?