Learn Quill

A programming language you can read like plain English — no experience required.

What is Quill?

Quill is a programming language designed for people who have never written code before. Instead of cryptic symbols and jargon, Quill uses everyday English words. You say say to print something, is to create a variable, and to to define a function. If you can read a sentence, you can read Quill code.

Under the hood, Quill translates your code into JavaScript and runs it — so you get the power of a real programming language with the readability of English.

Learning Path

If you are brand new to programming, we recommend reading the documentation in this order:

1. Step 1: Language Basics — Learn how to create variables, write functions, use loops, and make decisions with if/otherwise. This is the foundation for everything else.
2. Step 2: Standard Library — Discover the built-in functions that come with Quill: math, text manipulation, lists, file handling, and more. These are your everyday tools.
3. Step 3: Developer Tools — Learn how to run, build, format, test, and check your programs using the Quill command-line tools.

Or, if you prefer to jump around, use the cards below to go straight to what interests you.

Explore the Documentation

Your First Program: a complete walkthrough

Let's walk through creating and running your very first Quill program from scratch. No prior experience needed.

Step 1: Create a file.

Open any text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code — anything works). Create a new file and save it as hello.quill. The .quill part at the end tells your computer this is a Quill program.

Step 2: Write your code.

Type the following line into your file:

say "Hello, World!"

That is it — one line. The word say tells Quill to print something to the screen. The text in quotes is what gets printed.

Step 3: Run it.

Open your terminal (also called the command line or command prompt) and type:

quill run hello.quill

Step 4: See the result.

Hello, World!

That text appears in your terminal. Congratulations — you just ran your first program.

What happens behind the scenes: When you type quill run hello.quill, Quill reads your file, translates the English-like code into JavaScript (a language computers understand natively), and then runs it. You never need to see or write JavaScript yourself — Quill handles all of that for you.

What to do next: Try changing the text inside the quotes and running it again. Then move on to the Language Guide to learn about variables, functions, and more.

A quick taste of Quill

Here is a bigger example that shows off several features of the language: variables, functions, loops, lists, and pattern matching.

-- Variables: just use "is" to store a value
name is "Quill"
version is 1
say "Welcome to {name} version {version}!"

-- Functions: use "to" to define reusable blocks of code
to greet person:
  say "Hello, {person}!"

-- Lists: group values together with square brackets
friends are ["Alice", "Bob", "Charlie"]

-- Loops: do something for each item in a list
for each friend in friends:
  greet(friend)

-- Pattern matching: handle different cases cleanly
to describe age:
  match age:
    when 0 to 12:
      give back "child"
    when 13 to 17:
      give back "teenager"
    when 18 to 64:
      give back "adult"
    otherwise:
      give back "senior"

-- Try it out
say describe(25)
say describe(8)
say describe(70)

Output:

Welcome to Quill version 1!
Hello, Alice!
Hello, Bob!
Hello, Charlie!
adult
child
senior

If that code made sense to you just by reading it, you are going to love Quill. Head over to the Language Guide to learn each feature in detail.