Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder) | Hacker News

A Hacker News post follows a bottom-up project that started by translating Turing machine descriptions into an encoded tape for a Universal Turing Machine.

As the system grew, the author added an interpreter, IR, debugger, visualizer, and even bootstrapping experiments.

The story shows how a toy compiler/toolchain idea can quickly expand into a full programming-language stack.

It highlights both how approachable PL work can be and how much complexity appears with each added abstraction.