I decided to undertake the project after my friend Matthew Hinton introduced me to stack based programming -- he claimed that they were elegant because they allowed for both easy metaprogramming and side effects, to which I agreed after writing a little bit of my own language. It was really easy to implement, too -- most of it took only one day, and getting the basic functionality working took only 2-3 days.

Goals -- I eventually want to write an emacs-like text editor in stem by writing a C library that does bindings for ncurses. I think it would be fun, for one, and I think it would not be that hard of an end product to make. I also had plans of writing a stem compiler, and I already pretty much know how to do that, but there are a couple of difficulties in doing that. Namely, right now, there is no way of telling the difference between compile-time and runtime operations, which will slow the language down considerably. My solution to this currently is basically "interpret once, run binary forever", but the details are still need to be worked out.

Problems it solves -- to be honest, you can really do anything in any programming language, but this langauge aims to be a higher level rendition of stack based programming languages, mostly for scripting and creating abstract representations of things.

Note that I am still trying to write in a couple things, namely, an actual include statement as a builtin that reads from some predetermined standard include directory, and an OOP implementation using metaprogramming in the standard library.

Not to mention the fact that I have been really interested in writing programming languages since I was in high school. One interesting thing about stack based languages is that the AST need not be generated at all. I taught myself a lot of linguistics, specifically generative grammar, as a result of attempting writing various programming languages in the past, and so these types of projects are just interesting to me.

If you ARE looking for one unique thing about this language, though, it is that `def`, the method by which you define functions, is itself a word. I don't think a lot of stack based languages do this (because it is much harder to compile languages like this as mentioned above), but it offers much more internal consistency within the language as a result.