EggLang

code

Inspiration

Egglang was originally hatched during a late-night coding session when I came across a devpost hackathon in San Antonio.The idea? To build a fun, minimalist programming language where every concept is inspired by eggs, birds, or both. What started as a joke in my mind, writing a program that begins with yolk and ends with a hatch, quickly made into a fully functional interpreter.

The sheer absurdity of using phrases like crackup for defining functions
To basically make it unique and funny, if it is.

What it does

Make simple programs currently with .egg filenames.

How we built it

Interpreter: Walked the AST and evaluated each node using Python classes.
Features: Added variables (yolk), arrays (carton), pattern matching (shellmatch), functions (crackup, lay), and built-in utilities like eggtime().
Extras: Added fun side commands like eggspionage — a secret easter egg animation when you run eggspionage in the CLI.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing silliness with actual usability, making sure Egglang wasn't just a joke, but something you could write real (simple) programs in.
Designing syntax that feels "egg-themed" yet readable and intuitive
Debugging parser edge cases when nesting blocks or working with user-defined functions
hatch not recognizing expressions correctly (e.g., hatch len(a))
Lack of support for parameterized function calls like add(3, 4)
Array methods (a.append(4), a.pop(), a.remove(0)) initially treated as unknown commands
Conditional blocks (if, else, endif) not supported inside function bodies initially
Inline comments (# comment) breaking expression parsing and causing errors
Comparison operators (==, !=, >, <, etc.) not fully supported or causing issues in expression evaluation
utils.egg needed to be rewritten to avoid unsupported syntax (e.g., arrow functions, parameterized functions)
Function definitions (fun) didn’t support parameters or proper argument handling
Scoping issues requiring introduction of current_env() and call_stack to handle function local variables
incubate command loading files with unsupported syntax or comments caused silent failures or crashes
Nesting constructs like loops inside functions or nested loops initially did not execute properly

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The eggspionage easter egg, which is a terminal cam.
Made a VS Code extension, which is not live on the vs code extensions store yet, but it supports .egg files language highlighting.