Growing a Language, by Guy Steele

What do you say to people like Guy Steele who believe that small languages that can be grown by their users are the way forward, and do not want to pay to use a closed source programming language, ever? (fyi I'm referring to this famous talk he gave this video )

The argument on looking at Go's trend in isolation is a really weak one. Let's also look at Clojure in isolation: link - and oh look, Clojure runs on the JVM. > If I were a developer getting started today, I’d make a career bet on Go Advice on picking languages as career bets are especially weak. In my experience, careers are being built on being able to get stuff done and in the long list of things that a developer has to learn to get stuff done, the language itself is very uninteresting considering everything else combined. Personally it takes me 2-3 weeks to become functional in any new programming language, I've worked with half a dozen thus far in production and I played with another dozen in my free time. The language itself is like a drop in an ocean, compared to more fundamental knowledge that makes one productive, like math, algorithms, concurrency and parallelism, hardware, usability, domain specific knowledge, libraries, frameworks, being able to interact with a community, etc... > Go is a simple language by design. You can read the spec and other materials on the Golang website and start being productive in a single day Simplicity in the language doesn't translate to simplicity in the solutions that you're building. This is a fundamental divide, since often people are mistaking simplicity for easy, for being familiar. It's not in the original sense of the word - simplicity is the opposite of complexity, which means interwoven or entangled and in the context of s

The logical extreme of your argument is to make everything a `div` with classes. While possible, the main issue with that model is that it provides no encapsulation strategy. Encapsulation is one of the core tools for programmers for building complex programs, so having first class support for that in the templating language suddenly makes a lot of things easier. Without encapsulation, a lot of things become more frustrating. Event bubbling has to be micro-managed. Dev tools are less useful. It becomes even more frustrating to deal with conflicting CSS IDs. Steele's Growing A Language[0] talk specifically points to encapsulation as the core building blog for programs. Given how HTML is used nowadays (React + Angular are both "HTML as program layouts" models), not having encapsulation is a crutch [0]: this video

I think you can draw this ‘core of an environment’ parallel between Forth and Scheme: both are small languages and they emphasize growing the language to the problem domain [1]. Common Lisp, on the other hand, is a large language: implementations provide much more than a foundational core, and a fairly comprehensive list of libraries exists. I think RPG’s Worse Is Better highlights some of the reasons why CL isn’t as popular as other languages [2]. [1] this video [2] link

I would say Java the language is fine, but the culture around it is what's grown the distaste many have for it. The overuse of design patterns, etc. I also find it fun how Guy Steele had in retrospect the perfect plan for Java back in the 1990s, and it took them 15 years to come around to it: this video

Reading the paragraph about Galileo's telescope reminded me of Guy Steele's talk Growing a Language: this video

> Of course, I also accept that maybe the current vernacular is degrading. Sure, that's possible --but all the evidence I see is that humans can perform incredible feats of communication with the most strict limitations on language. "Using language my audience understands" is a strictly easier task than "using language my audience understands and also keeping iambic pentameter", and Shakespeare did that harder task across 39 plays. Language has evolved since Shakespeare, but it has evolved to become more capable, not less, and the current vernacular is evolved to fitness for current communication. And sure, the current vernacular is evolved for fitness to the average user's needs rather than for history specific communication, but as with any jargon, you simply define your jargon terms in the vernacular and then you can use the jargon terms. It works much like this[1]. [1] this video

This is the PDF of the talk given here: this video It's Guy Steele[0]'s keynote at the 1998 ACM[1] OOPSLA[2] conference. [0] link . [1] Association for Computing Machinery [2] The 13th annual ACM SIGPLAN[3] Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications. [3] SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on programming languages.

Go is rediscovering Guy Steele's Growing a Language from first principles, at a much slower pace: this video