How did you decide on a vision for your programming language?

Hi,

The title should be self explanatory, but if you want to see where I’m at context is below.

I’m in the relatively early stages of designing my programming language.

However, I’m struggling to really capture the essence of what I want out of it.

I have a very vague idea: a natively compiled language along the lines of Go or C++, that takes a hoist of features from other languages, like:

\- Monomorphized generics

\- C-style pointers at base (with safe stdlib abstractions for better quality of life)

\- Rust-style enum and interface types

Despite these general ideas I have, I’m really struggling to bring them together into a nice package of a programming language.

My idea is basically to make a programming language that can compile down to a lean, native binary (or even other targets?), but still be user-friendly. C++ is manual memory management, Rust has a borrow checker in the way, etc.

The issue is I’m also struggling to decide what I want. Do I want a focus on native binary compilation? Multi-platform shenanigans (like Kotlin)? Object-oriented or imperative? What syntax should the language even have? I just can’t gather a solid vision for the language, enough to make something out of it.

Ideally, I want a programming language I can throw around on multiple platforms, with Rust-esque and Kotlin-esque semantics, without a bunch of hassle or having to worry about memory management. This is a very wide scope though and finding a vision for it is tricky due to all the features, I explicitly want to avoid a C++-like kitchen sink.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get a vision for a programming language & figure out what it needs vs. what it doesn’t?