About

min is a concatenative, fully-homoiconic, functional, interpreted programming language.

This basically means that:

• It is based on a somewhat obscure and slightly unintuitive programming paradigm, think of Forth, Factor and Joy but with parentheses for an extra Lispy flavor.
• Programs written in min are actually written using quotations, i.e. lists.
• It comes with map, filter, find, map-reduce, and loads of other functional goodies. See the seq Module for more.
• It is probably slower than the average production-ready programming language.

Why?

Because creating a programming language is something that every programmer needs to do, at some point in life. And also because there are way too few concatenative programming language out there – so people are likely to be less pissed off than if I made a yet another Lisp instead.

I always wanted to build a minimalist language, but that could also be used for real work and provided a standard library for common tasks and functionalities like regular expression support, cryptography, execution of external programs, shell-like operators, and keywords to work with files, and more.

Additionally, I wanted it to be fully self-contained, cross-platform, and small. Not stupidly small, but I feel it’s a good compromise compared to the alternatives out there, considering that you only need one file to run any min program.

I also created a static site generator called HastySite, which also powers https://min-lang.org. HastySite internally uses min as the language to write the rules to process the source files of the site, and also all its scripts.

Finally, I think more and more people should get to know concatenative programming languages, because concatenative programming matters.

How?

min is developed entirely in Nim – the name is (almost) entirely a coincidence. I wanted to call it minim but then shortened it for more… minimalism.

min’s parser started off as a fork of Nim’s JSON parser – adapted to process a concatenative programming language with less primitive types than JSON. It is interpreted in the traditional sense: no bytecode, no JIT, just plain read, parse, and run.

Who?

min was created and implemented by Fabio Cevasco, with contributions by Peter Munch-Ellingsen, Yanis Zafirópulos, and baykus871.

Special thanks to mwgkgk for contributing to the design of native dictionaries.

When?

min source code repository was created on November 8^th 2014. This only means that I’ve been very slowly developing something that was actually made public at the end of July 2017.