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Comment by timsneath | Hacker News Reader

Lox must have the highest ratio of (implementations : production usage) of any language on the planet. And I mean that as the highest praise -- it's proven a fantastic teaching language, and your book is infectious at encouraging others to jump in and follow along in various different languages.

I've also found the exercise of implementing Lox in another language as highly instructive in learning how to write idiomatic code in that language. I continue to learn more about the best way to express patterns as I work on my own implementation. I'd recommend the journey to any professional developer for this side-benefit alone.

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   > Lox must have the highest ratio of (implementations : 
   > production usage) of any language on the planet.

It's probably up there, for sure! But I'd guess that there are a million toy Lisp implementations, and more people are interested in writing a FORTH interpreter than actually using one in production. So I'd guess if we tried to get statistics it wouldn't be at the top.

Though there's probably a similar claim to be made for the Monkey-language from Torsten Bell, via his books on compilers and interpreters.

https://monkeylang.org/

> Lox must have the highest ratio of (implementations : production usage) of any language on the planet.

Maybe! It's definitely getting there. I suspect "semi-arbitrary subset of C" still has me beat but who knows for how much longer.

All praise Bob!

On a more serious note, have you thought about trying to aim lightning at the same spot again and write another book about implementing something most programmers take for granted?

I've definitely thought about writing a third book. I don't know if it would be about "something most programmers take for granted". I'm more interested in writing about whatever happens to excite me the most at that time.

I may be projecting, but I feel like the kind of person to get excited about crafting interpreters wod also get excited about crafting databases or OSes.

Maybe, but alas I don't know enough about either of those to write those books.

Hey Bob just made an account to let you know how much I appreciate both of your books and how much of an influence you've made on my life choices

Just want to hopefully make you feel warm inside knowing you've made a really big difference to people's lives

Thanks for being you

A type system sequel to Crafting Interpreters, please. Or a JIT compiler sequel.

I'd imagine cool is up there as well: https://nguyenthanhvuh.github.io/class-compilers/cool.html

I think Brainfuck might be more widespread. :)

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