It depends what your goal is. My own reason for writing my own programming language was to have a virtual machine for a multi-player 3d games framework that I wrote in 1996. This sat on the back-burner for a few years, and then I used the compiler and virtual machine in a commercial project.
Probably less than 100 people have developed for the language (mostly just tweaking the provided applet code), but the goal never was to unleash a new language onto the world. The aim was to provide a rock solid platform for our product that allowed people to customize the applets if they wished, and it achieved that.
I would recommend people build their own programming language simply for the hell of it - it's challening, fun, and could come in useful in future.
Also it won't take "years" to get a working prototype. You can get something working in less than a month. It will obviously take a lot longer to get it stable and bug-free.
> Also it won't take "years" to get a working prototype. You can get something working in less than a month.
It all depends on the language. Tiny domain specific languages might only take hours, under the right circumstances (for an experienced language implementer).
When someone says "years", I assume they mean an industrial strength general purpose language.
Yes, perhaps a month was optimistic. Looking back through my emails, I see it took me 5 months (in my spare time) to design my language and instruction set and develop the compiler and VM. After that I wrote the function libraries. This was the first (and only) compiler I've written, and I just bought a book on compiler construction to figure out how to do it. This was an object-oriented C-like language, which was general purpose. It took a few years of actually using the language to make it "instustrial strength".
Writing a compiler is a lot simpler than people might think. I used "Practice and Principles of Compiler Building With C", which explains things very well. It seems to be out of print now.
Probably less than 100 people have developed for the language (mostly just tweaking the provided applet code), but the goal never was to unleash a new language onto the world. The aim was to provide a rock solid platform for our product that allowed people to customize the applets if they wished, and it achieved that.
I would recommend people build their own programming language simply for the hell of it - it's challening, fun, and could come in useful in future.
Also it won't take "years" to get a working prototype. You can get something working in less than a month. It will obviously take a lot longer to get it stable and bug-free.