selik/brevity-lang

Brevity -- A programming language

Brevity -- A programming language

"Brevity is the soul of wit"

-- That Polonious guy.

Brevity is a pithy programming language. My goals for Brevity are to keep the language simple and small, yet expressive and cross-platform, with batteries included. To that end, it must be a LISP (or Lisp?) and have a good package manager.

Unlike most Lisps, Brevity tries to use plain words that will be more natural to a first-time programmer. Brevity minimizes jargon and maximizes fun.

Brevity's standard library includes a style-formatter to help avoid silly arguments over tabs versus spaces and a static analyzer with inferred typing to help verify correctness.

Brevity aims for speed secondarily, but hopes to achieve C-like efficiency through a just-in-time compiling interpreter and a habit of relatively small "hot paths" through the code, to make good use of the cache. To avoid branch mispredictions, Brevity encourages sorted data structures and a high degree of polymorphism to enable algorithms with few conditionals.

Perhaps most important for many of today's internet-first applications are great tools in the standard library for building secure, scalable web applications and APIs that make efficient use of datacenter resources.

For practicality, Brevity has integrations with other programming languages enabled through standard library modules.

Note that these statements are wishful thinking, not reality.

Copyright (c) 2017 Michael Selik.