want to make a programming language again
it's been a while...
@commie I made a DSL called "Snoopy" once upon a time where you wrote VB.NET programs using XML that was parsed with a DTD and pseudo-transpiled directly.
It was as horrible and unusable as you might imagine. But somehow the "business users" thought it was easier than writing code because they could "click and drag" valid tags to build reporting programs.
@commie double yick!
I did a similar thing using Bison/Jison in coffeescript to parse raw SQL statements coming from an IBM Asset Management system and translate them to IndexDB to query offline synced datasets on tablets 🤒 🤢
It was so absolutely fragile to develop, then once it worked there were CI tests in place to literally shoot air darts at people who changed the code.
Programming Jenkins to fire air darts was 100x more fun than that project.
@adasauce that's just... just an impressive combination of awfulness
@commie upon re-reading I realize it seems like I'm trying to upstage you with extreme stories.
i'm with you in commiseration. fuck javascript 
@adasauce oh no it's cool
absolutely fuck javascript
@adasauce i once made a shitty custom version of javascript as part of a domain-specific language (yeah, a programming language inside a programming language...). it worked horribly and was incredibly fragile and when i realized people were actually using it because i was getting bug reports for it i just kinda pretended it never happened.