Building an Emoji Programming Language: Why and How
Or: 👋🌏
Hello, and welcome to my workspace here on Medium! This is the first in a series of posts where we will, together, develop a programming language that is written entirely in emojis and is interpreted at runtime into Python. In this first post, I’ll be writing about the impetus behind this project to unshackle ourselves from the old 104-key, as well as my general approach to building the project moving forward. Finally, I’ll discuss some of my considerations in actually designing the language, something I hope to continue in the next part.
Why Build an Emoji Programming Language?
The impetus for this project is simple enough: while I work with Python in my current role, I wouldn’t call myself an expert. Most of my work in Python has been maintenance and feature development on an existing Flask back end, while the majority of my full-stack personal projects have instead employed NodeJS/ExpressJS. That is to say, while I feel I could build object-oriented code from scratch in the language, I’ve yet to really test my mettle in the Python realm.
But why an emoji-based programming language in particular? More than a few times, I’ve been on a train or bus and wanted to do some light coding. Yes, mobile terminal emulators exist, but on my tiny…
