{@ _defs_.md || 0 @}

## What?

**min** is an concatenative, fully-homoiconic, functional, interpreted programming language. 

This basically means that:

* It is based on a somewhat obscure and slightly unintuitive programming paradigm, think of [Forth](http://www.forth.org/), [Factor](http://factorcode.org/) and [Joy](http://www.kevinalbrecht.com/code/joy-mirror/) but with parethesis for an extra [Lisp](https://common-lisp.net/)y flavor.
* Programs written in min are actually written using *quotations*, i.e. lists.
* It comes with map, filter, find, map-reduce and loads of other functional goodies. See the {#link-module||seq#} for more.
* It is probably slower than the average production-ready programming language.

## Why?

Because creating a programming language is something that every programmer needs to do, at some point in life. And also because there are way too few [concatenative](http://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Front%20Page) programming language out there -- so people are likely to be _less_ pissed off than if I made a yet another Lisp instead.

I always wanted to build a minimalist language, but that could also be used for real work and provided a standard library for common tasks and functionalities like regular expression support, cryptography, execution of external programs, shell-like operators to work with files, and more.

Also, I wanted it to be fully self-contained, cross platform, and tiny. Less than 1MB is not really tiny, but I feel it's a good compromise compared to the alternatives out there, considering that you only need _one file_ to run any min program.

I am currently building a static site generator called [HastySite](https://github.com/h3rald/hastysite), that also powers <https://min-lang.org>. HastySite internally uses min as the language to write the [rules](https://github.com/h3rald/min/blob/master/site/rules.min) to process the source files of the site, and also all its [scripts](https://github.com/h3rald/min/tree/master/site/scripts).

## How?

min is developed entirely in [nim](https://nim-lang.org) -- the name is (almost) entirely a coincidence. I wanted to call it _minim_ but then shortened it for more... minimalism.

min's parser started off as a fork of nim's JSON parser -- adapted to process a concatenative programming language with less primitive types than JSON. It is interpreted in the traditional sense: no bytecode, no JIT, just plain read, parse and run. 

## Who?

I am a [someone](https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabiocevasco) who is passionate about technology and who _does not_ build new programming languages for a living.

## When?

min source code [repository](https://github.com/h3rald/min) was created on November 8^th 2014.