Article URL: https://crowdhailer.me/2026-06-08/a-programming-language-for-humans/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49078463 Points: 19 # Comments: 6

Eat Your Greens (EYG) is a statically typed functional programming language. It is a better programming language, for some measure of better. This post explains what I consider to be better and which features that requires adding or removing from the language. I started building a language during a 10 week wait for my visa to start a new job in Sweden. I built EYG specifically after noticing a recurring pattern amongst technically minded, but not professional, developers. These tools and problems fall in the broad category of end user programming. Some people prefer citizen developer because it captures the usecase of non professionals making useful contributions at work. My favourite way to describe software not for mass consumption is home cooked. Essentially creating software to solve a problem should be available to people who don’t make it their full time identity to be a developer. Full time developers can spend more time keeping up with changing technology than others. If only 10% of your job is writing software then reading about writing software isn’t happening. Sympathy for the machine only exists in developers. They will happily explain why integer overflows need to happen. The average human response to integer overflows is “WTF, that’s not how numbers work”. We have BigInt and 99% of the time the WTF response is the correct one. On average, developers are working on larger problems. This makes sense - some developers are working on software projects with hundreds of others, whereas end user software is probably less than one human’s fulltime attention. This means developer tools underserve the smaller problems. There are a lot of humans who can do the first work fine but don’t have the time to master the second category. I call these humans “makers”.