Thench

A very early work in progress collaboration between Joseph Ivie and Garrett Jennings.

The 'then' wrench, a programming language for all

fun main(infer inout io: IO)
    println("Welcome to Thench!  What is your name?")
    val name = readln()
    println("Welcome, $name!")

Status

Very, very early in exploration.

Scales effectively - the language should not present structural issues with large projects or dependency trees
- A good way of stating it is that a whole computer's code should be usable in a single project without namespacing or interface adaption nightmares
Useful for scripting and direct user interaction
Useful for higher-level development, such as apps and HTTP servers
Non-committal - The ability to back out of using the language or use it temporarily as part of editing an existing project
- I imagine it as opening an existing code file, converting it to Thench, modifying it, then converting it back

Purely functional programming
Metaprogramming, but with full autocomplete support
- Possible specifically due to the 'pure' (all computation dependencies tracked) trait of the language
Excellent code editing tools
- Full LSP support
- Refactoring actions
Syntax feels extremely comfortable and similar to the most commonly used programming languages
- "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
- Look at similarities between the current forerunners of similar purpose - Typescript, Kotlin, Swift, Dart, C#, Python
Self-transpiling using reflection
- Import existing libraries in the platform
- Export readable code for the target platform
Acts as its own build system
External code management at the function and type layer instead of the package layer
- Publishing a single function or type should be easy
- Versioning must be smooth to support this
- Separate API and implementation versions to support bug and security fixes with deep dependency trees
- Unit tests built-in to each declaration
Theoretically highly optimizable
- Concrete optimizations can come later

Kotlin - encourages pieces of the language to be self-similar where possible, making more of the language implemented in the standard library
Koka - min-gen philosophy, universal function call syntax, Perceus memory management
Nim - self-transpiling