Language design: back to the future?

Abstract

Programming languages are the medium used to express our wishes to a computer. Unlike human languages, we can alter, destroy, and create them at will. Despite this, mainstream programming languages are surprisingly homogeneous with the differences between them often amounting to little more than surface syntax issues. New ideas rarely get a toe-hold in the marketplace and those that do have typically been used for decades by a sizeable minority (e.g. dynamic typing). In this talk the speaker will suggest reasons for the inherent conservativeness of programming languages, their designers, and their users. He will look back at some largely forgotten languages - some older than others - that introduced distinctive language features, and offer thoughts on their successes and failures. He will show how a series of seemingly outlandish ideas scavenged from such languages can be blended together to form part of a coherent modern language - one that also aims to try and inject a few new memes of its own into the languages pool.