Stephen, since Neil mentioned Alan Kay’s highly informative(*) HOPL essay, let me also point you to Ingalls’ essay (which Robby pointed out to me about a year ago):
http://web.archive.org/web/20070213165045/users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html (*) One of his guidelines is “abolish assignment statements”. I loved it when I could use this in my ECOOP keynote way back :) > On Jun 30, 2019, at 12:43 PM, Neil Van Dyke <n...@neilvandyke.org> wrote: > > Lots of earlier HOPL papers are experience writeups relevant to the question > of PL design. (For example, Alan Kay did a great history of Smalltalk, which > talks about more than just the language design itself, and the language > design was influenced by the other things.) > > Separate from what's in HOPL, there are other related writeups floating > around. Most recently, I saw Kent Pitman did an interesting one on Common > Lisp standardization (you'd also want look at whatever Guy Steele says about > that, John McCarthy's HOPL on Lisp in general, and various other Lisp > people's reports): http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html > > Closer to home, there's Scheme. I don't know all that's currently written up > about Scheme history (and it's ongoing, including with RnRS and various > implementations), but most of the players are still around, and they should > probably be encouraged to write if they haven't already. Olin Shivers wrote > an account of T: http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html > > Then there's various papers and writeups on other Lisps (Clojure, Arc, Dylan, > more researchy), which might be interesting in what they chose to change (not > just added features), and why. > > Separate from PL histories, and various models of computation, I think we > start to get into human issues like linguistics and aesthetics, and I don't > think that's well-understood in PL, nor does it seem to be the same for > everyone. (For example, simply from looking at how people use Racket syntax, > put roughly, it looks like some people seem to use visual while others seem > purely verbal or mathematical; what happens when someone from one of those > categories tries to design an intuitive or convenient language for everyone, > but everyone isn't processing the language the same way?) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/8cab8e8a-593e-a7d2-fa56-ef9b163503c5%40neilvandyke.org. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/56ECF35E-2E87-436F-8A5C-FC099FDD71F8%40felleisen.org. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
