alt.hn

2/20/2026 at 5:34:12 PM

Lil' Fun Langs

 https://taylor.town/scrapscript-000

by surprisetalk

2/20/2026 at 9:40:30 PM

loon is a lisp! https://github.com/ecto/loon

  [type Shape
    [Circle Float]
    [Rect Float Float]]
  
  [fn area [s]
    [match s
      [Circle r]  => [* 3.14 r r]
      [Rect w h]  => [* w h]]]
  
  [area [Circle 5.0]]

by ecto

2/20/2026 at 9:48:12 PM

idk how I haven't crossed a lisp with square brackets but dang I am sorta stunned at how I've never even envisioned it? thanks

by grimgrin

2/20/2026 at 7:45:46 PM

My little language Newt is 7 kloc. Dunno if it's worth including, it's mostly an exercise to learn how these things work and is not as polished as I'd like.

- Self-hosted

- Compiles to javascript

- Bidirectional typechecking with NbE (based on elaboration zoo)

- Dependent type checking

- type classes

- ADTs with dependent pattern matching

- TCO (trampoline for mutually tail recursive functions)

- Erasure of compile-time only values (0, ω quantities, but not linear)

- Web playground

- LSP (added this month)

- Syntax is similar to Agda / Idris / Haskell

https://github.com/dunhamsteve/newt

by dunham

2/20/2026 at 6:37:34 PM

Fluent – 4K lines – including parser, interpreter, standard library, IDE, UI, docs, examples. Will grow though.

https://github.com/mlajtos/fluent/blob/main/client.tsx

by mlajtos

2/20/2026 at 6:58:35 PM

I'll add it! Thanks.

EDIT: Actually, it's not quite "ML-family" enough for this post. But it is a remarkably cool project! :)

by surprisetalk

2/20/2026 at 8:09:41 PM

If you're accepting additions here is a fun one some friends and I did as experiment at the Topos Institute: https://github.com/ToposInstitute/polytt

And here is a set of single file lambda calculus implementations with a variety of extensions: https://github.com/solomon-b/lambda-calculus-hs

`polytt` is kind of an ended experiment but that lambda calculus repo i plan to extend in the near future.

by solomonb

2/20/2026 at 7:38:37 PM

The hardest part with small languages isn't the parser, it's the standard library and error messages. Getting a helpful IDE experience in that footprint is a significant engineering challenge.

by nimbus-hn-test