Part of working through “Learning VimScript the Hard Way” involves sitting down and writing your own plugin for the Potion programming language. But before doing that I wanted to play around with the language for a little bit. For those not in the know, Potion is a small programming language that was written by “_Why the lucky stiff”, before his mysterious disappearance from the Internet.

Again, prerequisites seem to be the difference between a smooth build, and searching all over the Internet for reasons why an esoteric programming language won’t build on your machine (Ubuntu 14.04 in my case). Let’s make sure we have all of the prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool autotools-dev automake

Then clone over a copy of potion, build it, and test the build:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/perl11/potion.git potion-lang
cd potion-lang
make
make test

… and we’re off to the races!