> A non-trivial companion project like that seems great for naturally guiding a language!
It's definitely an interesting aspect. For most languages, the only substantial project during their early life is their own compiler. There is an intriguing theory (posted on HN a few weeks back?) that this results in languages that are optimised for writing compilers, at the expense of writing other things.
Are there other examples of languages that had this kind of companion project in their early life? Did UNIX do this for C? To what extent did Rails do it for Ruby? Is there something inside JetBrains that does it for Kotlin, or inside JBoss that does it for Ceylon?
It's definitely an interesting aspect. For most languages, the only substantial project during their early life is their own compiler. There is an intriguing theory (posted on HN a few weeks back?) that this results in languages that are optimised for writing compilers, at the expense of writing other things.
Are there other examples of languages that had this kind of companion project in their early life? Did UNIX do this for C? To what extent did Rails do it for Ruby? Is there something inside JetBrains that does it for Kotlin, or inside JBoss that does it for Ceylon?