Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

Many countries have multiple languages. Wales has English and Welsh. The Irish got Gaelic, and Cornwall in England has Cornish. In Norway, we technically have three languages: Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Sami.

One can argue that we can technically speak Nynorsk as well, which is true, but there is no "pure" Nynorsk dialect. Nobody speaks "pure" Nynorsk, at least not unless going out of their way to do so. There are many dialects that come pretty close, but none are Nynorsk. This makes Nynorsk a purely written language, which I find fascinating.

One can make similar arguments about Bokmål and Sami, but people speak Sami. And I would argue that a lot more people speak "pure Bokmål" than Nynorsk.

Or maybe I'm just pulling this out of my ass, and I don't know what I'm talking about.

The point is that I made a purely Nynorsk programming language: Brunost.

Brunost is held in high regard in Norwegian culture as a smooth, sweet goat cheese that we use for waffles, sauces, and sandwiches. It is the most Norwegian of cheeses. If you want to have a good time, put some brunost on your waffles with strawberry jam and sour cream!

This is why Brunost is the perfect name for a Nynorsk programming language. Sweet and smooth, yet with depth that tickles the palate. Therefore, let me present "Hello world" written in perfect Brunost:

bruk terminal
terminal.skriv("Hei, verda!")

Do you see its smoothness? Come on, give it a taste! And if you don't like it, then maybe you're the problem. Have you thought about that?

Brunost is a delightful functional language. It is interpreted, and its types are almost as loose as your mum.

The Brunost interpreter is written in Zig, which is why it is blazingly fast-ish. Python and JavaScript are going down!

With Brunost, you'll get unmatched aesthetic performance with unmatched Nordic bravado.

Heck, you can play with it online, in your browser, right now!

One of the most important aspects of Brunost is that it requires Nynorsk. Variable, parameters and function names must be in Nynorsk. The interpreter ships with a Nynorsk dictionary that is used during the interpretation, and if the developer tries to do anything but Nynorsk, they'll get a clear message:

Feil: Namnet er ikkje gyldig nynorsk: 'thisIsNotNynorsk' på linje 8, kolonne 6

Nynorsk is no longer a minor subject in school. Soon, it will become a requirement for the Norwegian IT industry!

Many lesser languages value developer expression. Brunost knows that developers overuse jargon and should use plain (Nynorsk) language rather than fancy abbreviations.

I know that you're about to explode from anticipation, so let's go over this magnificent syntax, shall we?

You can assign a variable like this:

fast fart er 80

Now, the keyword fast here is saying that the variable fart cannot be changed - it is immutable.

If you try to change it like this:

fast fart er 80
fart er 50 //Error

then you get an error:

Kan ikkje endra ein uforanderleg variabel (deklarert med 'fast')

If you want to change a variable, you must mark it with endreleg, which indicates that it is changeable:

endreleg fart er 80
fart er 50 //Ok

A language where you cannot create branches is not very useful, so we have the viss statement, which functions similarly to how if statements work in other languages:

bruk terminal
fast fartsgrense er 80
fast minFart er 90 // Change this for different outcomes
viss (minFart erStørreEnn fartsgrense) gjer {
terminal.skriv("For høy fart!")
} ellers viss (minFart erSameSom fartsgrense) gjer {
terminal.skriv("Farten din er på grensa!")
} ellers {
terminal.skriv("Farten din er innafor.")
}

Here we see a classical if-else demonstration where we can use ellers to chain viss statements, or just to have a default branch.

You might also notice the English comment in that code snippet. I KNOW! It's horrid. Disgusting! It is revolting! But I did it for you, dear reader, because I'm no bigot and I love you despite you not understanding Nynorsk. After all, we all have flaws, and mine is caring too much.

A functional programming language without functions wouldn't be very useful, and I think it is already clear that Brunost is super useful. So Brunost has functions as well!

bruk terminal
gjer kalkulerFart(distanse, timer) {
gjevTilbake distanse / timer
}
fast distanse er 50
fast timer er 2
terminal.skriv("Din fart er: " + kalkulerFart(distanse, timer) + "km/t")

Here we have the function kalkulerFart, which is called within terminal.skriv.

Within kalkulerFart, we have the gjevTilbake statement (give back in English), which is essentially a return statement in other languages.

You might wonder what happens if we move kalkulerFart under the terminal.skriv call? Well, things break, of course! Why would you want to use something that hasn't been declared yet!? Silly.

Brunost has strong opinions on the order of declaration. Developers are expected to know the order in which things exist.

Being able to iterate over things is important, and Brunost has got you covered!

Here we have Brunost's version of a foreach loop called forKvart:

bruk terminal
fast fylke er ["Vestland", "Rogaland", "Troms", "Finnmark"]
forKvart namn i fylke {
terminal.skriv("Hei frå " + namn + "!")
}

And we also got a while loop:

bruk terminal
endreleg teljar er 1
medan (teljar < 4) gjer {
terminal.skriv(teljar)
teljar er teljar + 1
}

We got the common ones, don't worry. We got the numbers, strings, and whatnot. But why do we have to be so specific about it? Why the need to box everything into rigid types and structures? What are you? Some kind of rigid nerd?

Don't worry about the types, man.

So far in the code snippets, you have seen the keyword bruk; this is how we do imports.

So far, we've seen terminal, a built-in module, but we have others, like matte and streng.

You can also create your own modules. Let's say we have two files, one called "hovud.brunost" and the other called "logikk.brunost".

In hovud.brunost, if you wanted to use something from logikk, then you would do:

bruk logikk

But let's say that logikk is in a subfolder called "kode", then we would do it like this:

bruk kode.logikk

Every program can fail. Brunost can do a lot, but it cannot break physics (yet). But Brunost tries to help you deal with those failures with classical try-catch logic:

bruk terminal
gjer del(første, andre) {
viss (andre er 0) gjer {
kast "Kan ikke dele på null"
}
gjevTilbake første / andre
}
prøv {
del(10, 0)
} fang(feil) {
terminal.skriv("Noe feilet: " + feil)
}

Some might say that errors-as-returns is better than exceptions. Why? Just don't make errors. Easy as that.

One fun thing is that making a Wasm deployment of the interpreter was not that difficult, and you can use it online right now!

I didn't put much effort into it, which is why the game of life implementation further down is really funky in the online version.

This section of the post only exists in a vain attempt to boost my SEO by mentioning Wasm. Let's hope it works.

Joking aside for a second: I won't be making a whole ecosystem for this silly language. There are a few more things I want to have in place before I wrap up completely:

Hashmaps. Proper documentation. Enough features that Brunost can serve a website. Some way to deal with non-Nynorsk words that are still allowed in Nynorsk. Some FFI support. File read/write in the standard library. A language mascot.

After this, I will most likely just leave Brunost as a fun little thing that people can play around with.