Lesson 1: Welcome & Overview

[sampsyo]

There's not much to Lesson 1—just write your ideas about what goes into a good language implementation other than optimizations!

[rcplane]

A good language implementation should have a written and tested standard specification for all core language features to allow for the possibility of later implementation improvements with less fear of breaking compatible feature behaviors.

This value can be observed in practice from Python interpreter implementations based on C, JVM, attempts to remove GIL, more parallel threading, and type hinting for programmer productivity. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language) "Major implementations" )

[HLRJ]

A good programming language should have a relatively low learning curve.

[praveer13]

A good programming language should be simple enough to write without being too bug prone and have safety features built in that protect the programmer from common pitfalls or bugs that can arise out of language semantics or ambiguity of language itself, and maybe enforce good practices out of the box and still be human readable.

[jiayiyang1997]

A good programming language should provide more flexibility and allow programmers to touch lower-level features of operating systems. It should also have great readability and have features which allow programmers to apply modern design patterns for software and implement data structures and algorithms conveniently.