Maybe it would be productive to think of programming languages as 'skinnable'?
The cost would be:
- every library written in a different 'skin' ==> you'll never grow mature, interoperable libraries
- every developer would spend eons designing his own gratuitous dialect of the language instead of being productive
- code written in those (generally poorly designed) lingoes would be hard for a new developer to take on and maintain. Remember that unless your program is of no interest to anyone, the critical part of its lifecycle will be maintenance, not the alpha-version design.
- in addition to maintaining your piece of software, you'll have to maintain your variant of the parser. And it's rather hard to correctly design a parser.
- in the special case where you disguise a language's surface syntax into another's (here lua into JS), you're actively deceiving your hypothetic users, by introducing a profound mismatch between that syntax (which triggers reflexes in the developer) and the semantics (which would remain Lua's).
OTOH what would be the matching benefits? Is anyone in the world interested by hiring developers who can't even adapt themselves to type "end" rather than "}"? Is their any hope to get such people to work in teams, to be able to focus on issues that matter, to put themselves in their users' shoes, etc.?
