I've been busy with dead languages, cryptology, and other cool stuff, but in the midst of it all I found I had a legitimate business need that could best be solved by creating a scripting language. Well, sort of.
Basically, I need to have a library on one machine in one operating system, and a client on another machine in another operating system. The client needs to be able to access the functionality of the library, which can't be ported to the other machine. I was thinking I could expose the functionality via a service, then design a protocol that would allow the client to use the functionality via tightly controlled remote function calls.
The building blocks for the RPC protocol are essentially the same building blocks that I would use if I were to design a scripting language, minus the parser. As I was working on this, I couldn't help but think how easy it would be to make a functional scripting language out of all this.
I think I will table the idea of a parser for now and try this scripting language idea out.