Gurt - Programming Language

About Gurt

Gurt was originally intended to be created as a very basic language for a project in my programming language design course at York College of Pennsylvania and was initially designed in the Fall of 2023. However, the project evolved into much more. Gurt is now a functional programming language, programmed in Python, based off of a mix of the core concepts behind the design of JavaScript and Python. Gurt can currently be used for very basic programs and has been designed with the goal of being used as a tool to introduce those new to programming to the core concepts such as data types, loops and branches, and functions. Unfortunately, the language is no longer being developed as I have decided to move on to other projects. However, the language is fully functional, and can be used by cloning the project and following the steps found on the project's GitHub Repository.

Project Background

     As I began my Fall 2023 semester at York College, I began to become extremely interested in creating my own programming language. The inspiration behind this came from my Professor, Dean Zeller, as he pushed me to go the extra mile on my assignments, which I had not experienced from many other professors at the college. Thanks to this drive that he sparked, I began to want more regarding what I was programming for his course, and eventually took it upon myself to not only make tokenizers, code generators, and things of this sort, but to try to break the barrier and create my very own programming language, which included creating each part of the interpreter that Gurt uses. I learned a great deal about what goes in to designing a programming language throughout the process, and I plan to create another language that uses a compiler rather than an interpreter.
     The inspiration behind the name of the language is straightforward: I have always joked with my friends about having a pet goose named Gurt when I was older. Seeing as this has always been a joke and not a real goal for me, I decided what better way to put the joke to use than to create a language that has the name, with its logo being a goose, that I can use to develop real world applications.