SMRTR ProgrammingMay 11, 2026Reddit

7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Create a programming language

SMRTR summary

Building your own programming language interpreter is easier than you think. Starting with the lambda calculus — the minimal, Turing-complete core behind Haskell, Python, and JavaScript — you can write a working interpreter in just 7 lines of Scheme. The article then scales up to a 100-line interpreter supporting recursion, conditionals, and higher-order functions, using the classic eval/apply design pattern from SICP.

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