Fledgling Languages List

To be fair, the book isn't complete yet and it hasn't nearly reached 1.0 yet. Some other listed languages are at similar stages of development, like Nim, Crystal, Ceylon, Elm, and Julia (in fact, a few of these seem closer to a production-ready product than Idris does). I assume most of these will be removed after an official 1.0 launch.

I can't say about how the site is maintained (i.e. who makes the various decisions about each language) but it's updated quite regularly. I have changedetection.com monitoring the site and changes happen all the time. Here's the recent change list: https://www.changedetection.com/log/presidentbeef/fll/index_...

Edit. Also, "This site exists to promote languages which are in development or have not yet reached a wider audience." I'd agree that none of the listed languages have reached a wide audience in (terms of usage anyway) regardless of the other criteria. But it's all relative and I do really like the site.

It's not just the implementation, though. The thing that differentiates Node from in-browser JS is something like a standard library—but really it's something we don't really have a term for in software architecture. It's the fact that in-browser JS has a DOM to work with, while Node has processes and files and other Unixisms to work with. Effectively, Node and JS-in-browsers are two sublanguages, each exposing the distinct set of abstractions their underlying platforms provide.

This is distinct from the difference between, say, MRI Ruby and JRuby and IronRuby: those all fundamentally present the same (Unix) abstractions. The C, JVM, and CLR implementations of Ruby are effectively all composed of two parts: first, a shim on the underlying platform allowing it to be presented as having Unix platform abstractions; and then, a compiler/interpreter written in terms of those Unix platform abstractions. Instead of IronRuby exposing, say, a Window with a thread-pool as the basic actor type, you still get Processes with Threads; instead of IronRuby exposing NT Objects with ACLs, you still get Files with read/write/execute masks.

Although this distinction is important, it's usually pretty trivial. There just aren't that many platform abstractions that existing languages really target, other than Unix, web browsers, and (rarely) SQL databases.

There are some rare exceptions that have their own set of platform abstractions: Smalltalk, MOO games, Erlang, Lua, and Microsoft's Midori project, to name a few. This is why you don't tend to see a language directly "ported" to or from any of these runtimes; it'd end up a different sublanguage, and indeed often an entirely new language. (One could argue that Elixir, for example, is what happens when you "port" Ruby to Erlang's runtime; or that MoonScript is what happens when you "port" CoffeeScript to Lua's runtime.)

Point being: I don't know whether a list of fledgling ports/implementations of languages would be all that interesting, where those ports/implementations retain the original language's platform abstractions. But I'd love to see a list of fledgling sublanguages that adapt an existing language to the platform abstractions of a new or different platform.