Getting Involved in Programming Language Standards?

Carnage4Life asks: "After continually being surprised by the evolution of various programming languages (the most recent occurances being the change in meaning of the protected keyword in Java, as well as the addition of the restricted keyword in C) I've decided that I wish to get involved in the standards process for a variety of languages. This has proven to be easier said than done. So how does one get involved in the standards process for a particular language, be it C#, Javascript, Perl, C++, Java, C, Python, or any other language? I know each of these languages probably has a different process so please feel free simply to point out how to get involved in the languages you have knowledge about." Interesting question, but I think the best advice to fall back on is: "ask around". Most compilers and interpreters at least have the author's email address or a mailing list where these can be directed. With that said, has anyone done this for a specific language? If so, please tell us of your experiences.

Comments

Re:Know Your Language

[pne]

In order to work on the "standard", you need to get Larry or Guido's ear, that is get on the perl-developers or python-developers mailing lists, and have ideas that people respect.

Specifically, for Perl, subscribe to p5p, aka perl5-porters. Mail sent to perl5-porters-subscribe@perl.org should do it.

If what you're mostly interested in is keeping track of changing things, then feel free to hang out and listen on p5p. That's where most patches get sent and people talk about implementing new features, so you'll get to hear about a new keyword being proposed and struck down or adopted, or a change in syntax, or a new module being added to the core.

Larry Wall only posts occasionally; the people responsible for the releases are known as "pumpkings"; the pumpking for 5.6.1 (the latest release of the stable branch) is Gurusamy Sarathy and the for 5.7.1 (the latest release of the development branch) is Jarkko Hietaniemi. There are also pumpkings for areas such as the regular expression engine.

If you want to get noticed, one good way might be to start submitting patches. bugs.perl.org exists and has lots of ideas you could consider -- even if it's only a report that "this bug doesn't occur any more with the latest release" or "I can reproduce this here on <platform>, and I think the problem might be in foo.c line 134", without knowing how to fix it. But for a start, it's undoubtedly better to start off as a lurker and see what happens.

Cheers,
Philip.

Re:Newsgroups and email lists.

[hding]

At least one person (Kent Pitman) who was involved in writing the ANSI Common Lisp standard is regularly found in comp.lang.lisp. Perhaps a polite question to him would find him willing to share some of his experiences (also, you can surely find some of that in the archives of c.l.l as well).

Newsgroups and email lists.

[Chacham]

Just wanting to join some standard doesn't mean that you are "good" at it. Check out the newsgroups and email lists about the languages. Learn what others know, and talk about it. Eventually your name will mean something, if it should, and people might actually come to you when working on the language.

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