Lambda the Ultimate

Onward 2009 essay* by Elisa Baniassad and Clayton Myers.

A well written essay that argues how programs form their own unique and self describing languages. Whereas programming languages have formal execution and are designed for the programmer to tell the computer what to do, program languages communicate what the program does to other programmers and (over time) to the programmer themselves. They claim that programming languages and program languages are inversely related in complexity: a higher-level programming language allows our program language to be simpler, which makes sense.

A couple of implications that I found interesting: First, perhaps we have to teach program languages as well as programming languages; e.g., knowing Java != knowing how to hack Eclipse code, we have to learn a lot about Eclipse through documentation and studying its source code first. Second, code migration (moving code from one program to another) is essentially language translation as the code must be translated from its from-program language to the to-program language, even if the programming language hasn't changed.

Ralph Johnson also has a good blog post on the essay.

* Unfortunately, the only link I could find was behind the ACM paywall. The paper hasn't made it to the author's homepage yet.