Monday, April 30, Gzag 123, 5:10-6:30 pm.
Over the last quarter-century I have become convinced that trying to design a complete and perfect programming language is the worst thing you can do. A programming language (including its associated libraries) must grow over time as its user community and its development community grow. This is a different situation from 25 years ago, when all such communities were relatively small. The difference is a problem of scale. As a result, programming language design now and in the future is necessarily as much a matter of social engineering as technical engineering and must rely more on a set of general principles than on a set of specific technical decisions.
Host: Andrew Garland