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Computer Science - Brian Kernighan on successful language design

University of Nottingham · 332.1K views · 2015-11-17 · 1:00:06

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Overview

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as a practical talk on language design and for background on awk from one of its authors.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2022

Topics

Programming language designTech pioneers & interviews
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brian kernighanawklanguage designdomain specific languagesunix

What people said

teleforce · 2022-12 · Strong recommendation

This is an excellent talk on designing successful programming language by Brian Kernighan [1]. In the beginning of the lecture he did show a picture of the Tower of Babel depicting plethora programming languages as it's appeared in the cover of Communications of the ACM (CACM) magazine in January 1961 and most of the programming languages mentioned in the article were already there! [1] Brian Kernighan on successful language design: [VIDEO]

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ad404b8a372f2b9 · 2022-12 · Recommendation

All talks by Bret Victor are great, they are listed on his websites but they are more concerned with the future of programming than old languages: [LINK] On the topic of language design, there is also this talk by Brian Kernighan which gives good practical advice if you're building a language and talks about his journey with awk: [VIDEO]

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chrisfinazzo · 2018-05 · Recommendation

There's a great talk by bwk where he complains about exactly this kind of behavior...before admitting that anything useful in a language will be abused in order to do silly things. [VIDEO] I'll admit, I'm no fan of Python, but this has little to do with the language itself. I found Bash and Ruby first, so Python just seems like too much work to get right. Requisite xkcd: [LINK]

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Sources

Video by University of Nottingham, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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