Goals

These are my goals for Stone, roughly in order of importance. My goals for Stone are varied, and perhaps not typical for a programming language.

Have fun
- Have fun designing and implementing a new language
- Make programming more fun for others
  - Similar to Ruby's focus on joy
See if I can make something useful
- Useful to myself, and hopefully others
- Explore some ideas I have
  - Can we merge Ruby's ideas with static types, immutability, and AOT compilation?
  - Can we merge pure FP and OOP nicely?
    - In a way that OOP programmers will be willing and able to move to?
  - Can we make a "regular" syntax that's still familiar?
- Focus on practical aspects, over cutting-edge academic topics
General-purpose
- Good at web apps, CLI utilities, GUI apps, one-off "scripts"
- Good for math, engineering, text processing, web services, network access
High-level
- Don't optimize for low-level use
  - No operators for bit operations
- Don't require manual memory management
- In general, make the computer do more work
Correctness is more important than speed
- Floating-point binary math is not the default
  - We want 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 to be TRUE, as almost everyone would expect
- Arbitrary-precision math
Make something easier to learn than Ruby and Python
- More "regularity"
- Fewer concepts to learn
Faster than Ruby and Python
- Faster than their mainline implementations
- Not counting compile time - that can be amortized
  - With modern IDEs, it can start as soon as a change is made
    - Can use caching, so only changes to files are compiled

Stretch Goals