Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Lightweight Languages

Posted by timothy on from the just-enough-to-say-hello dept.

Denise writes: "'What happens if you get a bunch of academic computer scientists and implementors of languages such as Perl, Python, Smalltalk and Curl, and lock them into a room for a day? Bringing together the academic and commercial sides of language design and implementation was the interesting premise behind last weekend's Lightweight Languages Workshop, LL1, at the AI Lab at MIT.' Simon Cozens report, on perl.com, says it wasn't the flame fest you might have imagined."

1 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Reinventing the wheel and money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Troll

    The article touches on the idea of academics looking down upon programming languages that badly solve again and again problems that have already been satisfied in the academic literature.

    Is this literature free? Can I find it on the internet somewhere? Is someone maintaining a repository of best practices? Better yet, is there someone who sees mistakes being made and points the team to this freely available information?

    I am asking because I don't know. My suspicion, however, is that most of this knowledge is locked in high-priced peer-reviewed journals, overpriced textbooks, and papers distributed among an elite group, rather than being released freely to the community of developers who work on free software.