Bill Pugh
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2014–2026
53:31 · 165K views · Jul 15, 2012
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.
HN considers it one of the best technical talks ever and cites it in discussions of language design, small cores and extensibility.
20 comments from Hacker News
This is probably the best talk ever on the general topic: this 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.
He gave a brilliant talk about it: "Growing a Language"[1]. The idea is to make languages that grow —ones that provide a small, uniform core that can be extended by the user. Ideally, these extensions feel like first-class citizens: things added by users should feel on par with built-in language features. It's still one of the best technical talks I've ever come across. [1]: this video
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: this video
Not a paper, but one of my favorite talks this 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.
I recently watched Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" talk. It's very much related to jmoiron's post here, and is worth a watch despite its age: this video Steele's commentary on "Worse is Better" seems to me to be a better representation of the original essay than the one expressed here about Go. Steele says: "The gist of ['Worse is Better'] is that the best way to get a language used by many persons is not to design and build 'The Right Thing,' because that will take too long. In a race, a small language with warts will beat a well designed language because users will not wait for the right thing; they will use the language that is quick and cheap, and put up with the warts. Once a small language fills a niche, it is hard to take its place." In other words, the lesson of 'Worse is Better' is that getting a 'good enough' thing to market, and benefiting from the network effects of its widespread use, will always beat getting the 'the really good' thing to market in the same category, because the cost of delay is the loss of (community) network effects. The illustrative example here is UNIX and C, but it can be easily cross-applied to more recent projects. From that vantage point, Go isn't a good example of 'Worse is Better'. It occupies the same niche as C, but was delivered nearly 4 decades later. It seems to be a "second edition of C" designed with very explicit goals of correcting specific deficiencies of C as a systems programming language, but without the scope creep that ch