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Growing a Language, by Guy Steele

Bill Pugh · 165K views · 2012-07-15 · 53:31

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Overview

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

On Hacker News

HN considers it one of the best technical talks ever and cites it in discussions of language design, small cores and extensibility.

Recommended by 11 HN people across 10 months · HN mentions 2014–2026

Topics

Programming language designTech pioneers & interviews
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guy steelegrowing a languageoopslalanguage extensibilitylispjava

What people said

kaba0 · 2022-04 · Strong recommendation

This is probably the best talk ever on the general topic: [VIDEO] [Growing a language by Guy Steele], seriously give it a look if you have the time and do put up with the seemingly strange start. But at around the end it asks this (paraphrasing): Should a language have complex numbers implemented natively? Should it have numbers module n implemented natively? What about intervals, or rational numbers? I also dislike the ridiculous overloading of cryptic symbols, but neither extreme is good. Not allowing overloading will give you BigDecimal.of(3).add(BigDecimal.ONE).divide… , while allowing it unrestricted will give you things like msg #!! something. But perhaps a sane middle ground is to allow only basic operators (+,-,*,/) to be overloadable.

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pfarrell · 2020-03 · Strong recommendation

Haven’t read it but remembered this paper being mentioned in Guy Steele’s fabulous “Growing a language” talk [0]. I don’t want to give anything away about the talk (which is one of my absolute favorites), but Steele says about the title of this paper: “... the truth is that Dick Gabriel knew how to choose words with punch“ 0: [VIDEO]

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gnaritas · 2017-08 · Strong recommendation

Not a paper, but one of my favorite talks [VIDEO] Growing a Language by Guy Steele (co-inventory of Scheme). Brilliant speech about how to grow languages and why it's necessary. Languages that can be grown by the programmer, like Lisp or Smalltalk are better than languages that fixed like most others, this is why.

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Sources

Video by Bill Pugh, played through YouTube.

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