People here often talk about creating programming languages to make programming easier. Going one level of abstraction up. Does anyone work on making a way to create new programming languages easier?

there’s ohm • https://github.com/harc/ohm • https://ohmjs.org/

Yeah, that's one of the main ideas behind Language-oriented Programming. The best language in which to make other languages at the moment is that team's main research vehicle, Racket.

The ability of PEG to specify matches of balanced brackets, allows one to think about languages differently, e.g. it is possible to imagine “language stacks” and “transpilers”. Below, a simple grammar in Ohm-JS that skips over anything that isn’t a brace bracket...

main = matched main?

matched =

| "{" main "}" -- nested

| anythingelse -- bottom

anythingelse = ~"{" ~"}" any

Also https://tratt.net/laurie/essays/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast_enough_time.html and https://www.graalvm.org/

Also https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

Thanks for many nice links (post more if possible). I wonder whether there is someone in this community who works on these or similar projects?

a) I build DaS (Diagrams as Syntax) languages using Ohm-JS + SWIPL (PROLOG). If I liked writing nested-loops and exhaustive search, I would skip PROLOG and just use JS/Python/whatever. b) I have very strong opinions about VPLs. #1 is that I stay away from VPLs and go for the middle road - a hybrid of text+diagrams+overlapping (anti-grid-based languages, like just about all text-based languages). SVG seems to have more than what is needed (rects, ellipses, lines, text, (x,y)). #2 is that you need to think 0D+Simultaneity (AKA Concurrency (0D == zero dependency)) to draw sensible diagrams of programs. c) No, I don’t know of any IDE that makes VPL construction uncomplicated enough to use. I roll my own.

PLT circles are still mostly focused on the syntax + semantics approach that started in the 1960s, so anybody who wants to use non-syntactical notation is pretty much on their own. That said, the Racket people ship an IDE for the base language that's extensible enough to support projects like this: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428290