How Heraclitus would Design a Programming Language

CowboyRobot writes "Developer of Smalltalk Alan Kay has an interview on ACM Queue where he describes the history of computing and his approach to designing languages. Kay has an impressive resume (PARC, ARPAnet, Atari, Apple, Alan Turing Award winner) and has an endless supply of memorable quotes: 'Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term,' 'Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you're always going to get a pop culture,' 'most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training,' 'All creativity is an extended form of a joke,' and 'nobody really knows how to design a good language.'"

Comments

Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

'Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term'

Perl fills a 'tiny short-term need'? Is that why Morgan Stanley, RyanAir, Amazon, Ticketmaster and even increasingly Google to name but a few are using it for real, business-critical applications?

I'm so sick of all this anti-Perl talk. I write powerful applications in Perl and they are definetly not 'write only'. If anyone writes a 'write only' program in any language then it is the programmer who is at fault. Perl assumes a bit of intelligence on the programmer's side, rather than adopting Java's policy of bondage. And contrary to what a previous comment said, Perl is a general purpose language (with excellent built-in data structures and regular expressions, and a convenient and expressive syntax).

This guy might have an impressive [sic] resume, but he is badly showing his ignorance about Perl.

Re:Lisp

[Stu Charlton]

So I don't particularly like his pigoenholing of lisp - he says there were three working extensible languages, and smalltalk was one of them, kindof not mentioning however, that lisp _wrote the book_ on extensible languages.

I wouldn't be that hard on him.

If you search him further you'll see he has probably done more to promote Lisp than most others whose speciality isn't _already_ Lisp.

In his Turing award lecture this past October at OOSPLA 2004, he told the audience (paraphrased): "you owe it to yourself and your profession to seriously learn Lisp".