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OOPSLA Conference: Growing a Language

Computer History Museum · 24.1K views · 2020-08-17 · 54:12

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Overview

Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.

On Hacker News

Treated as a must-watch for language designers, and cited whenever extensibility and language size are debated.

Recommended by 6 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Programming language designTech pioneers & interviews
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guy steelelanguage growthextensibilityoopslajava

What people said

MrDOS · 2022-08 · Strong recommendation

This is an excellent talk, and exactly where my mind went, too. I might suggest watching this upload of it instead, to avoid capture errors in the older upload: [VIDEO]

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nfoz · 2022-01 · Strong recommendation

In case anyone hasn't seen this most excellent talk on this topic, I highly recommend: Guy Steele - Growing a Language (OOPSLA '98) [VIDEO]

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pohl · 2026-07 · Recommendation

It’s a tragedy. I feel the work they were doing was important. At least we got this talk from guy steele [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Computer History Museum, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

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