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"Programming Should Eat Itself" by Nada Amin

Strange Loop Conference · 42.6K views · 2014-09-19 · 47:41

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Overview

Nada Amin's Strange Loop talk on programming languages that build on themselves, centered on towers of interpreters and nestable interpretation in Scheme. She shows how interpreters can be stacked and collapsed.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a quick, wonderful look at infinite towers of interpreters and what they make possible.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2015–2024

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysisFunctional programmingProgramming language design
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nada aminschemeinterpretersmetacircularprogramming languages

What people said

Zambyte · 2023-07 · Recommendation

This talk isn't about VMs, but it is about an infinite tower of interpreters. You may find it interesting: [VIDEO]

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tosh · 2018-12 · Recommendation

> […] it is important to think broadly about the power of multiple sessions, even from the same user. At first we are talking about 2 sessions, for human and IDE. But it is quite common in rich Common Lisp IDEs like Lispworks for people to have multiple listener (REPL) sessions open at the same time (against the same runtime). You can launch long running processes that produce streaming output, switch to another listener and continue interaction and development, have separate listeners for separate contexts/state/command-history etc. There's a lot to Lisp development that's not RPC. And of course a socket REPL server could support multiple simultaneous users, where 'users' might be programs. > Have you ever worked with an environment like Lispworks or Allegro? If not, I would definitely recommend trying it. […] > [LINK] > [LINK] > Note multiple listeners, data inspectors and more. Maybe not the latest GUIs, but the capabilities should be a source of inspiration for any Clojure IDE. […] > Here's a wonderful demonstration of the power of nestability: > "Programming Should Eat Itself" by Nada Amin [VIDEO]

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minsight · 2017-11 · Recommendation

This is a very intereresting video featuring one of the authors (Nada Amin). Strangely enough, I watched it a few hours ago. It's a quick overview of the "tower of interpreters" idea and some possibilities that it brings. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Strange Loop Conference, played through YouTube.

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