Functional Programming for Writing Programming Languages

[drezap]

Just curious, what makes functional programming useful for writing programming languages?

Integrating multiple C/C++/python, etc. Just curious what the motivation is. I haven’t dug into it much.

[nhuurre]

I believe the main advantages are pattern matching and garbage collection because they make AST manipulation easier.

There’s a thread on the choice of language for the Stan compiler (although the discussion ends up being mostly RStan installation issues)

Choosing the new Stan compiler's implementation language

Hey all, @sakrejda asked for a write-up for how we thought about which language to choose. Here are the desiderata for language features when choosing a language to write a compiler in, some of which are specific to the needs of Stan given that we essentially create desktop apps (vs cloud something something). Pattern matching - this makes tree transformations first-class in a language, enabling you to write compiler phases much more easily. Fun - we want something that will inspire programme…