nanolang

Cool little project! You might find inspiration from Jordan Hubbard's nanolang project: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang > My projects are almost all AI generated although I take effort in understanding the theory behind each project. One pro-tip: You will not really understand the theory behind a language or programming unless you write your own code and solve hard problems yourself. So, mix some of that into your projects.

Related: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46684958 https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang SudoLang: A Powerful Pseudocode Programming Language for LLMs: https://medium.com/javascript-scene/sudolang-a-powerful-pseu... Programming Without People: Designing a Language for LLMs: (ALaS (AI Language Specification)): https://dshills.medium.com/programming-without-people-design... LMQL ("LMQL is a programming language for LLMs."): https://lmql.ai/ Which language is best for AI code generation? The answer might surprise you: https://revelry.co/insights/artificial-intelligence/which-la...

I was more commenting on the language design here; the idea of indexing into a UTF-8 string and returning an ASCII character. What does the index count? Bytes? There doesn't seem to be a way to get UTF-8 characters from strings? Ed: There seems to be an UTF-8 library: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/tree/main/modules/...

The author's answers are toward the bottom of the README, https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang?tab=readme-ov-file...

I went looking for a single Markdown file I could dump into an LLM to "teach" it the language and found this one: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.m... Optimistically I dumped the whole thing into Claude Opus 4.5 as a system prompt to see if it could generate a one-shot program from it: llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \ -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMORY.md \ 'Build me a mandelbrot fractal CLI tool in this language' > /tmp/fractal.nano Here's the transcript for that. The code didn't work: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7847f022566d11629ec2139f1d109... So I fired up Claude Code inside a checkout of the nanolang and told it how to run the compiler and let it fix the problems... which DID work. Here's that transcript: https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596b