What is a programming language

One goal for this site is to examine some questions relating to programming languages:

• What is a PL?
• How are they created (constructed)? (Why is this so hard? Can it be easier?)
• What programming languages have interesting ideas, but aren't much used?
• etc

Let’s start with the first question

What is a programming language?

I think our first task should be to define what exactly a language is. There are a lot of complexities around how languages are implemented and how they tend to operate today. Our definition should be about the essence of what it means to be a language.

A language has four parts:

• abstract structure
• concrete syntax
• statics
• dynamics

TODO say a bit about each of these.

Of course, these four parts only encompass the pure analytical (academic?) heart of what a PL is. There are many more pragmatic (and more important) concerns when actually using a language:

• The core team building it
• documentation
• the ecosystem (the community (welcoming?, size), libraries)
• how it runs, which platforms
• is it compiled? interpreted? does it have a nice repl? editor integration?

These are important, but we don't have much to say about them in this post (we’ll come back to most of these in the future).