> Also it won't take "years" to get a working prototype. You can get something working in less than a month.
It all depends on the language. Tiny domain specific languages might only take hours, under the right circumstances (for an experienced language implementer).
When someone says "years", I assume they mean an industrial strength general purpose language.
Yes, perhaps a month was optimistic. Looking back through my emails, I see it took me 5 months (in my spare time) to design my language and instruction set and develop the compiler and VM. After that I wrote the function libraries. This was the first (and only) compiler I've written, and I just bought a book on compiler construction to figure out how to do it. This was an object-oriented C-like language, which was general purpose. It took a few years of actually using the language to make it "instustrial strength".
Writing a compiler is a lot simpler than people might think. I used "Practice and Principles of Compiler Building With C", which explains things very well. It seems to be out of print now.
It all depends on the language. Tiny domain specific languages might only take hours, under the right circumstances (for an experienced language implementer).
When someone says "years", I assume they mean an industrial strength general purpose language.