Specification vs. documentation (vs. Kernel)

Language specs are the most prestigious form of language documentation, and to many language designers the most familiar, so people describing new languages sometimes do so in the form of a spec. They write of what implementations “should” and “must not” do, as if there were any implementations, and of portability, as if there were any code to port, and with a language lawyer's opaque rigor, as if there were any language lawyers to defend against.

This is a waste, of course. Unless you're standardizing a language that's already popular enough to have multiple implementations, you should be writing documentation of what the existing implementation does, not a specification of what implementations should do. And if it's a research language, your audience is researchers, not users, so you should focus on elucidating your new ideas, not on thoroughly documenting the mundane parts of the language.

This is what I thought when I read the Kernel spec. But after only three years, there are some eighteen other implementations of vau-based languages, and at least two (klisp and klink) aim to comply with the Kernel spec. Fexpr lisps are so simple that a full implementation fits in the scale of a casual personal project. The other objections may still apply, but at least Kernel has multiple implementations to standardize.