The programming language that makes you grin.

hotgrin is a free, open-source programming language that reads like plain English — and compiles to a real, fast program. Learn to code without fighting punctuation. Ship a genuine Windows .exe when you’re done

▶ Try it in your browser — nothing to install

▶ Get started in 5 minutes: read all about it

▶ Open source (MIT) · Built on Go · Errors explained kindly in English or Afrikaans

THE TASTE

See a complete program

action discount with price, percent
    give back price minus (price times percent divided by 100)
end action

set total to 897
say "Total: R" plus total
say "After 10% off: R" plus discount with total, 10

action discount with price, percent
    give back price minus (price times percent divided by 100)
end action

set total to 897
say "Total: R" plus total
say "After 10% off: R" plus discount with total, 10

The result is:

Total: R897
After 10% off: R807.3

Total: R897
After 10% off: R807.3

> No semicolons. No curly braces. No boilerplate.
> Names can have spaces — cart total is one name, the way you’d say it.
> Maths behaves like school maths — divided by gives a decimal, brackets group.
> plus just works — joins text, adds numbers, converts between them for you.

WHY HOTGRIN

Why people choose hotgrin

If you’re new to programming

> Write your first working program in minutes, not evenings — the tutorial takes you from zero to sharing your own program.
> Mistakes are explained kindly and precisely: “there is no value called ‘totall’ here — is it a typo, or did you forget to set it?” Never a wall of compiler jargon.
> Learn in English or Afrikaans — the only language we know of with first-class Afrikaans error messages.
> Try everything in the browser playground
before installing anything at all.

If you can already program

> hotgrin transpiles to real Go — inspect the output any time with hotgrin reveal. Nothing is hidden, ever.
> Testing is part of the language, not a bolt-on: test "..." blocks with expect ... to be ... assertions, run by one command.
> Failures can’t be silently ignored — fallible actions must be handled, enforced before the program runs.
> Structured concurrency (at the same time ... end at the same time) compiles to goroutines with the shared-state guarded for you.
> Cross-compile a Windows .exe from any machine with one flag.
> The whole language is a small, readable Go codebase —
read it, 70+ tests, CI on every commit.

If you teach

> Line-by-line syntax with explicit end blocks — nothing invisible, nothing implied.
> The Watcher checker never raises a false alarm, so learners trust it.
> A verified cookbook of 15 copy-paste recipes and a complete worked project ready for the classroom.