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BWK on "How to succeed in language design without really trying"

A talk by Brian Kernighan at The University of Nottingham.

Describes all the usual suspects: AWK, EQN, PIC. Even AMPL. I was wondering which languages he had in mind when he mentioned that some of his creations were total flops. I'd love to learn from those!

The talk is a fun way to spend an hour, and the audio would be good for commuters. For real aficionados I would recommend reading Jon Bentley's articles on the design of these languages (as well as CHEM and others) instead.

By Ehud Lamm at 2015-11-20 15:50 | DSL | History | other blogs | 20243 reads

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labor saving devices

Light paraphrases of talk highlights:

* AWK: These kinds of problems should be 1 liners.

* AMPL: Linear programming is simple in concept but there's a huge gap of tedious, mechanical programming translating word problems into solvers.

* EQN: Lots of people with a wide range of training can unambiguously "speak" math and write down what is spoken as a formatted equation on a chalkboard but in practice [at that time] a professional typesetter must manually make this tedious translation.

* Bell Labs should buy a printer that costs the same as 3 or 5 houses: With new tools like EQN the Labs can make it up with a reduced budget for human expert typesetters.

* pic: Doing a sample-position-lines graph of this voltage-over-time equation would consume a lot of hours of the time of a professional artist but with pic its just an extra line of code.

* functional programming: Usage lost in the noise. I don't think that way. Sometimes useful stuff is thrown over the wall.

* scripting languages: undisciplined/sloppy/practical/easy

* net value savings (labor reduction) depends on uptake (factors like familiarity, easy of learning) and niche (e.g. eqn lives and dies with troff)

By Thomas Lord at Fri, 2015-11-20 22:39 | login or register to post comments

Not a bad summary...

Not a bad summary...

By Ehud Lamm at Sat, 2015-11-21 08:11 | login or register to post comments