
Ask HN: What are the best references on language design - ljw1001
There is a lot of work on language implementation (parsing, compilers, etc.), but I haven&#x27;t found many good sources on the aesthetics of language design. What makes a good language good? Has anyone approached language design from a usability standpoint?  Thanks.
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ljw1001
Here's a few things I found myself, if anyone is interested:

Book: MacLellan's Principles of Programming Languages. The principles are
listed here: [http://www.lshift.net/blog/2006/06/24/bruce-j-maclennans-
pro...](http://www.lshift.net/blog/2006/06/24/bruce-j-maclennans-programming-
language-design-principles/)

Book: Masterminds of Programming. Interviews with the designers of many
languages. Not all equally good.

Papers and Media: History of Programming Languages, proceedings 1-3. The third
one includes video. (Paywalled -need an ACM subscription) Many classic
articles including Kay on Smalltalk, Richie on C, McCarthy on Lisp. Iverson on
APL. More recent languages include Haskell, Self, Lua. Many obscure but
interesting languages like ZPL, Beta, Modula, etc.

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ruraljuror
Brian Kernighan's talk on _How to succeed in language design without really
trying_ [1] was referenced in his recent interview on the software engineering
daily podcast.[2]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU)

[2] [http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/01/06/language-
desi...](http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/01/06/language-design-with-
brian-kernighan/)

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brudgers
I think the way to understand design aesthetics would be to investigate actual
languages. Probably the place to start is with languages that where people
talk about the design. Go, Ruby, Clojure, Perl 6, Forth, Scala come to mind as
languages where I've heard their primary developer talk about design
aesthetics in particular.

Good luck.

