

Guy Steele: Growing a Language (video 53:30) - ashutoshm
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415#
Guy Steele's keynote at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference on "Growing a Language" discusses the importance of and issues associated with designing a programming language that can be grown by its users.<p>Link to PDF
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
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jfm3
"This is the nub of what I want to say. A language design can no longer be a
thing. It must be a pattern -- a pattern for growth -- a pattern for growing
the pattern for defining the patterns that programmers can use for their real
work and their main goal."

One of the most incredible CS things I've ever taken in.

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dantheman
That's at time stamp ~13:18

I'm 100% in agreement, this applies not only to languages, but up and down the
technology stack. We need to use datastores that support schema evolution,
data objects that assume and open world and not a closed world.

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ashutoshm
Link to PDF <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf>

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CurrentB
Classic. If you care even the slightest bit about programming languages you
need to watch this.

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kenjackson
Guy Steele and Dick Gabriel gave a talk at HOPL a few years back. Another
great talk. It lacked the insight of this one, but purely a joy... CS poetry.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the talk online anywhere.

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tjr
Was it this one, perhaps? Or something similar?

[http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-
beaut...](http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-
code/)

~~~
groovy2shoes
This changed my life forever, if only because I got to see Guy Steele shout
"More cowbell!" and dance around a handful of sigils.

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pepijndevos
reaction; the action caused by an action

While I was writing a reaction, I thought I should use only words with one
syllable, and words defined in his talk.

information; facts learned. realize; be aware of

Other than the great information he gave, writing this reaction taught me how
hard it is to write in this style, let alone talk for a hour. I also realized
how much long words I use.

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gnaritas
Action/writing/only/syllable/alone have multiple syllables, your post would
not compile. Makes what he did very impressive.

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jholman
Guy L. Steele is a person who talked in the site linked at the top of this
page.

'Writing' and 'syllable' had their senses defined by Guy L. Steele in his
talk, as did 'senses' and 'defined' and 'speaker'.

As I now think on this, I note that the post in which you note errors could
change 'action' to 'act', change 'let alone' to 'much less', and change 'only
words' to 'no words but those'. The definition for 'realize' is in need of a
new definition, since 'aware' is not yet a word with a definition.

In truth, trying this mode of speech is bracing, and fun.

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shadowsun7
If you don't understand: wait till the 10 minute mark to get what he's trying
to do with you.

Truly, truly amazing.

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technomancy
This is one of those videos where watching the transcript just doesn't cut it.
You really have to hear it to get the full effect of the awkwardness.

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sblom
Is anybody else seeing strange, deterministic glitches where some of the video
seems to have been snipped out?

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ygooshed
"If you give a person a fish, he can eat for a day. If you teach a person to
fish, he can eat his whole life long. If you give a person tools, he can make
a fishing pole—and lots of other tools! He can build a machine to crank out
fishing poles." That's the essence of programming.

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MaysonL
If the river runs dry, or gets polluted, knowing how to fish won't help you.
What you really need is to learn how to learn: then you can learn how to hunt
when fishing doesn't work any more, or to farm when the game animals are all
gone. You might even be able to learn how to program.

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nickik
The famouse Statemant: "A Language needs to be designed to grow" is great.
Gilad Braha (maker of the Newspeak) top this statmend by saying: "Languages
need to be designed to take stuff away". Witch is pretty cool but much, much
harder to do.

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rch
It would be fun use hebrew this way, in a talk about dynamic languages
including tuples.

I don't know enough to take it on though, just thinking of that numerology
scene from Pi.

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dazzawazza
Well worth the effort to watch. It really does make you step back and think
about how we define the landscape we work in.

