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The problems I've been working on are at a much higher level than the nuts and bolts.

I'm currently exploring domain-specific languages aimed at writing web applications. I've been particularly interested in, much like bash, data flowing through pipelines. I have spent quite a bit of time and I'm definitely not vibe coding but I've probably only writen 1-2% of the code in these projects.

It is so much work to build out a new language with a surrounding ecosystem of tooling. Not even five years ago this would have necessarily been a full time multi-year endeavor or at least required a team of researchers. Now I can tinker away in my off hours.

This is what I am exploring:

https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-evolution-of-a-dsl

Did I not craft the syntax and semantics of these languages?





Speccing out a language, and implementing it, are two different kinds of work. There are doubtless GCC devs on the C standards committee, but when they're writing the standard they're not doing the same thing as working on GCC.

You decided you wanted to focus on speccing out your language and outsource the implementation. That's fine if you want to do that. But let's be honest: you outsourced the bits you considered boring or tedious. Someone else may find that the interesting part, and the experience of outsourcing it rather than building it themselves to be hollow in comparison.


No need to go that far. I bounced off weekend projects many times because I lost interest the moment I had to relive fighting the "modern" frontend ecosystem set up (or whatever else unrelated to the actual building), which is what I was already doing at the day job. In the end I just gave up because I'd rather get some rest and fun out of my time off. Now I can just skip that part entirely instead of tanning in front of <insert_webpack_or_equivalent> errors for hours on Saturday afternoon.



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