Growing a Language, by Guy Steele

What Hacker News said

Strong rec tikhonj · 2015-06 · on “The Tragedy of the Common Lisp, Or, Why Large Languages Explode”

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]

Strong rec gnaritas · 2017-08 · on “Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?”

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.

Strong rec pfarrell · 2020-03 · on “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)”

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]

Strong rec kaba0 · 2022-04 · on “Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang”

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 all

Recommends gramasaurous · 2015-11 · on “A Basic Guide for Curious Minds: Review of “Thing Explainer””

Reminds me of this[0] talk by Guy Steele where he explicitly defines any word outside of a given set before he can use that term in his speech. Interesting language exercise, definitely worth a watch! [0] [this video]

Recommends pixelmonkey · 2015-11 · on “For Better or for Worse”

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 langu

Recommends skystrife · 2016-04 · on “Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English”

This idea reminds me of an amazing talk by Guy Steele: [this video] He starts the talk by assuming monosyllabic words as his primitives and builds up the words he needs to use to give the talk by providing definitions for them first.

Recommends e12e · 2018-09 · on “Show HN: TechYaks – Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals”

Maybe these are mostly too new, or you have different (more practical, hands on?) definition of tech-talk - but from a quick look the only speakers I expected - and found - were Sandi Mets and Rob Pike. If it's practical, I'm surprised not to see the js "wat" lightning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general "best of", I'd expect something like Guy Steele "growing a language" : [this video] Douglas Engelbart "the mother of all demos": [LINK] Alan Kay "doing with images makes symbols": [LINK] Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: "a powerful idea about teaching ideas": [LINK] (Maybe that's not a "tech talk"?) Rich Hickey "simple made easy" : [LINK] To nam