Friday, 14 June 2013 11:30 @ Room 2
If your programming language is small, you’re probably born before 1950, and your first computer was bigger than your present apartment.
And even those languages are not so small. One spends quite some time to master a programming language. Why?
Because there are very many decisions “compressed” into the form of a language. Nothing limits a programmer’s imagination like a compiler, and nothing limits a language design like a real world with all of its “legacy”, compatibility concerns, performance limitations, generations-old habits and leaky abstractions.
This talk is about tradeoffs: why we, as language designers, do (or rather did) this and not that.