Cinnamon

RE: Hello, world

23/02/2026

When I was in high school, I wanted to build a programming language. I went on YouTube and followed some tutorials and nothing made sense. So I put the dream on hold.

Later, in university, I enrolled in a Coursera course titled 'Nand2Tetris: Build a Modern Computer From First Principles' and I enjoyed it! It is one of the best Computer Science courses I have ever done. As part of the course, I had to build a compiler for a small, Java-inspired, programming language, Jack.

That exercise gave me enough confidence and understanding to get started on my own programming language, which I named Cinnamon (after the spice with one of my favourite smells). After a few false starts, version 0.0.1 is here. This version is still very limited, but I will add to it over time and build a good version 1.0.0. I do not expect this language to be useful to anyone, not even myself, apart from the learning experience. Nevertheless, I would love it if you tried it out for a moment.

I have written a tutorial for learning the language and created a playground, where you can write and run Cinnamon programs in your browser. The grammar specification is on this page. I wrote the interpreter in TypeScript and the source code is hosted on Github. I have documented its internal implementation details there.

All the best,

Anesu