Devlog 1: Choosing The Syntax

2025-08-23

Traditionally, a language announcement starts with a grandiose plan to build something that everyone will use.

This isn't that.

Garden is a small programming language focused on tooling. It's a playground for my ideas.

Instead of grand declarations, let's talk about something unavoidable: basic syntax.

Functionfun fib(i: Int): Int {
  if i < 2 {
    return 1
  }

  fib(i - 1) + fib(i - 2)
}

Choosing Punctuation

Garden is a curly-brace language. I don't want to spend my strangeness budget on syntax, so it's deliberately conventional.

Conventional Loopslet i = 10
while i > 0 {
  println(string_repr(i))
  i -= 1
}
println("Blast off!")

Hopefully this code snippet is pretty readable to programmers from a range of backgrounds.

Choosing Keywords

I want keywords to be short. This follows Stroustrup's Rule, which favours short syntax for common operations. There's no real advantage to writing function in JavaScript, it's just more typing on the keyboard.

However, I want keywords to be pronounceable, hence fun instead of fn. This is based on the Strange Loop talk How to teach programming (and other things)? by Felienne Hermans (creator of Hedy). Felienne talks about the advantages of reading code aloud when teaching, and I want to support that. I say code aloud sometimes too, especially in conversations.

Keywordsfun say_hello(): Unit {
  println("Hello, World!")
}

Breaking Convention

Garden is focusing on tooling, so tooling features take precedence over traditional syntax.

One of those features is incremental program definition. Garden supports redefining individual methods (like Lisp or Smalltalk), which doesn't suit a traditional class definition. Nesting all your methods inside one big class definition doesn't make sense.

Instead, methods are defined at the same indentation level as functions, similar to Go.

Methodsstruct Person {
  name: String,
}

method greet(this: Person): String {
  "Hello " ^ this.name ^ "!"
}

fun demo(): Unit {
  let p = Person{ name: "Wilfred" }
  println(p.greet())
}

Next Steps

With the basics out of the way, we can start talking about more interesting things next time.

In the meantime, please explore the website and let me know if you have any initial feedback.