Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#2Great talk, one of my inspirations.
The "nub" (slightly edited):
"A language design can no longer be thing. It must be a pattern, a pattern for growth".
"My point is that a good programmer does not just write programs. A good programmer builds a working vocabulary. A good programmer does language design, though not from scratch, but building on the frame of a base language"
Oh, the paper if you don't want to watch the whole thing:
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#3Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#4A classic that is relevant today as it was 20 years ago. Thank you for the repost, it's a good reminder to (re-)examine what I'm doing these days in a larger context.
"..plan for growth with help from users. This is a win for you because you have help. This is a win for the users because they get to have their say and get to bend the growth to their needs."
"Parts of the language must be designed to help the task of growth. A good set of types, ways for a user to define new types, to add new words and new rules to the language, to define and use all sorts of patterns — all these are needed."
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#520 years later. What does Guy Steele thing about how Java ended up? We still have no operator overloading, no value types. There are plans, sure, but Java grows very slowly. Good thing? Bad thing?
Does anyone know if there is a follow up on this?
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#6This is one of my favorites. They played it for us when I was at https://www.recurse.com. I half appreciated it then, but it's gotten better with repeat viewings.
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#720 years later. What does Guy Steele thing about how Java ended up? We still have no operator overloading, no value types. There are plans, sure, but Java grows very slowly. Good thing? Bad thing? Does anyone know if there is a follow up on this?
There is, Ada continues to evolve and grow - it can even directly interface with Java...
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#820 years later. What does Guy Steele thing about how Java ended up? We still have no operator overloading, no value types. There are plans, sure, but Java grows very slowly. Good thing? Bad thing? Does anyone know if there is a follow up on this?
I think it's less relevant today, because we now have multiple languages running on the JVM - and I think that was always the most powerful feature of the Java program, the write once, run anywhere idea. Not so much the language itself, although at the time it was pretty good too.
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#920 years later. What does Guy Steele thing about how Java ended up? We still have no operator overloading, no value types. There are plans, sure, but Java grows very slowly. Good thing? Bad thing? Does anyone know if there is a follow up on this?
I think it's less relevant today, because we now have multiple languages running on the JVM - and I think that was always the most powerful feature of the Java program, the write once, run anywhere idea. Not so much the language itself, although at the time it was pretty good too.
IIRC Steele talks about languages which are extensible by users not just compiler writers. Although, JVM allows you to have multiple language implementation on top of JVM, it still doesn't make it easy to extend a language the way lets say Lisp can. He speaks of having primitives in language which allow programmers to extend language (macros?).
Re: Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (1998) [video]
#10this was the first video handed to me when I started in Java