I'm 45 years old, co-founder of a small programming company (AEGIK) that mostly does consultant work but we've also published some games.
I have been wanting to work on a language since Swift came out and we were plenty of devs that just said "why didn't we get something ObjC-3 instead?" and a lot of people started working on their own languages. That sort of triggered my interest in programming languages.
I've been wanting to contribute to some upcoming language, but have had some problems finding something I like. Either they're too OO, too high level, too crazy with making the language fool-proof in some aspect, too happy to add everything and the kitchen sink for good measure, too opinionated etc.
For myself I've looked at more advanced language ideas, scrapped those, thought of something else, scrapped that etc. I'm finding that the pursuit of language refinement and depth ends up quickly being a goal in itself.
Look at Rust, where the language is so opaque that you sit for hours just trying to get something trivial to compile.
Look at Zig, which has the big feature of compile time execution – which ends up making the code extremely hard to visually parse (there is some meta reading going on: you read the compile time code and execute it mentally to figure out what's actually compiled, then read what that compiled code would do), but that's the big idea of that language, so you're stuck with it.
These are ambitious, "exciting" languages with new ideas. But I'm not sure that the world needs another one of those.
I want a language with very little ideas and just good ergonomics. I'm also going back to the basics, realizing that the OO everyone spent about 20 years with is mostly a huge waste of time.
The fact that C2 tries to be very close to C is a very good constraint to work with for language design, which makes this project interesting.
