Phlo does not start on a blank page

Work on Phlo as a language of its own starts today. It starts with something already running.

What comes before it is a point of sale system written in plain PHP, in production and not academic in the slightest. Its receipt logs go back years, and the cash-count files beside them go back further. Shops, tills, staff, real money. The kind of system where nothing is theoretical and every shortcut taken two years ago is still waiting for you.

Building and maintaining that is what produces the opinions this language is made of. Code should be readable in one sitting, because you are the one reading it at an awkward hour. It should carry no ceremony that does not earn its place, because ceremony is what makes a codebase too heavy for one person to hold. It should run on a machine you control, at a price that tracks the machine. And the whole stack should speak one language, because translating between four ecosystems is where the day goes.

The oldest thing carried forward is a list of words. That older engine defines br, comma, cr, lf, slash, space, and those names come along unchanged. When almost every line is string assembly, naming the pieces is what stops the code looking like punctuation.

Everything else is open. There is no syntax yet, no parser, no transpiler. There is a working system to learn from and a clear idea of what it should have felt like to build.