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Life & fun · May 9, 2022

CS

Cognate – Stack oriented programming in English prose

Hi everyone, I just wanted to show off my WIP programming language Cognate, which I thought you might find interesting. It takes inspiration from Factor and Joy, but uses prefix notation. The compiler ignores words starting with lowercase, allowing comments embedded into statements. It is a dynamic, garbage collected language oriented around higher order functions.

Cognate – Stack oriented programming in English prose launched on May 9, 2022 with 19 votes, #864 of 2,942 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.

Visit cognate-lang.github.io ↗Alternatives

In plain words

Cognate is a work-in-progress programming language that uses stack-oriented computation with prefix notation, drawing inspiration from Factor and Joy. It features dynamic typing, garbage collection, and a focus on higher-order functions. The language allows developers to embed comments directly into code by starting words with lowercase letters, which the compiler ignores. Cognate is designed for programmers interested in exploring alternative language paradigms based on stack-oriented computation written in English-like prose.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Cognate is a project aiming to create a human readable programming language with as little syntax as possible. Where natural language programming usually uses many complex syntax rules, instead Cognate takes them away. What it adds is simple, a way to embed comments into statements. As you can see, Cognate ignores words starting with lowercase letters, allowing them to be used to describe functionality and enhance readability. This makes Cognate codebases intuitive and maintainable. Cognate is a stack-oriented programming language similar to Forth or Factor, except statements are evaluated right to left. This gives the expressiveness of concatenative programming as well as the readability…from cognate-lang.github.io

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