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 # yaepl
 Yet Another Educational Programming Language (or two!)
+
+## Project Goal
+Just playing around with a few ideas for simple programming languages that can help beginners learn programming fundamentals.
+
+I may more may not actually implement ones I find most promising. Overall goal is to define, build a compiler for, and test one and ultimately use it to teach Javascript at Develop Summer Academy in the summer of 2017.
+
+## Language Goals
+- **Consistent syntax:** as new concepts are introduced, students should reasonably be able to guess the syntax for their implementation based on previously learned syntax rules
+- **Focus on Objects:** the language should be object-oriented, and focus on making OOP concepts intuitive and understandable
+- **Powerful:** less of a language requirement, but students should be able to build interesting things with it (I/O, graphics, etc.)
+- **Translatable to Javascript:** the ultimate goal is to have the languages cross-compile and roughly parallel Javascript, so relatively large jumps (like from a Python loop over a `range` to a more traditional `for` loop) should probably be avoided
+- **(Future) Translatable to PHP:** in the future might want to do a similar thing for more traditional server-side programming languages, emphasizing the role they play.
+
+## Alternatives
+There are probably dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of languages and educational languages. See [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_educational_programming_languages) for a short list.
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