CSTN VS kesh

My recommendation is to just write something, even if it sucks. That goes for any concept. You'll learn faster and better by interacting with the machinery yourself versus trying to interpret someone else's abstract understanding of the machinery. In this case, that means choose a simple language or write your own grammar to play with, and make a parser for it. The first real parser I made is a recursive descent parser that parses a relative of JSON. If you're curious, my code is available), but I was a lesser programmer when I wrote it, so don't take it as an example of how you must do things. Regardless, it does work. I've continued to use the character stream code in every text parser I've written since, with some improvements.

I have something similar in kesh, where : is the assignment operator and the type/signature may be "assigned" before the value:

I'm not OP, in case you thought that :) kesh lives here. I tried incorporating some of the ideas discussed here, but posponed it to a later language, which I'm still thinking about.

This is a great idea that I've adopted for my PL. I took it a step further and also allow extensions of the core language to be specified, including profiles.

My (non-existing) language kesh, designed to compile to TypeScript, has expression blocks. That was one of my first decisions.

Still no work on a compiler, but more work on the documentation of kesh.

I'm working on kesh, but it's only at the design stage. I have tried to make it simple yet powerful, so I thought I'd mention it even though you can't use it.

I tried to distill down the most essential features of TS/JS (functional, prototypal) and then come up with new syntax and semantics that was minimal, orthogonal and hopefully easy to learn and use. The result is kesh and na.

I like the way you think. I had the same goal with kesh. A minimal syntax is easier on the eye and lets you focus on the actual code.

I'm only at the drawing board stage of kesh, a simple little PL that one day might possibly transpile to TypeScript. Not a single line of compiler code has been written so far, it's still all about syntax design and exploring ideas. kesh is mostly a pastime activity and something I can ponder over when I'm bored or can't sleep (which may be the reason I can't sleep).