Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from th...
Crafting Interpreters
Ever wanted to make your own programming language or wondered how they are designed and built?
The Next 7000 Programming Languages
Landin’s seminal paper “The next 700 programming languages” considered programming languages prior to 1966 and speculated on the next 700. Half-a-century on, we cast programming languages in a Darwinian ‘tree of life’ and explore languages, their features (genes) and language evolution from the viewpoint of ‘survival of the fittest’.
A Coming Revolution in Metaprogramming | Will Crichton
A single programming language is no longer enough. I predict that soon, the best programmers will fluently move between languages and the best languages will interoperate well with others. This interoperability will likely stem from strong metaprogramming facilities. I examine how we might build a programmable compiler and look at recent work toward that end.
Modular: The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software
Compilers occupy a special place in computer science. They're a canonical course in computer science education. Building one is a rite of passage. It forces you to confront how software actually works, by examining languages, abstractions, hardware, and the boundary between human intent and machine execution.
Programming Language Design in the Era of LLMs: A Return to Mediocrity?
The most exciting part of Programming Languages (PL) research for me has always been in Programming Language Design.
Arturo programming language
Arturo programming language: Simple, expressive & portable programming language for efficient scripting
Its Time for a New Programming Language
Today, when compared to any other point in programming history, we find ourselves spoiled for choice when it comes to programming…
Es: A shell with higher-order functions
In the fall of 1990, one of us (Rakitzis) re-implemented the Plan 9 command interpreter, rc, for use as a UNIX shell. Experience with that shell led us to wonder whether a more general approach to the design of shells was possible, and this paper describes the result of that experimentation. We applied concepts from modern functional programming languages, such as Scheme and ML, to shells, which typically are more concerned with UNIX features than language design. Our shell is both simple and highly programmable. By exposing many of the internals and adopting constructs from functional programming languages, we have created a shell which supports new paradigms for programmers.
The Story of C++: The World's Most Consequential Programming Language | The Official Story
Identifying Barriers to Adoption for Rust through Online Discourse (PLATEAU 2018) - SPLASH 2018
For PLATEAU 2019, see the workshop webpage at http://plateau-workshop.org/. Programming languages exist to enable programmers to develop software effectively. But programmer efficiency depends on the usability of the languages and tools with which they develop software. The aim of this workshop is to discuss methods, metrics and techniques for evaluating the usability of languages and language tools. The supposed benefits of such languages and tools cover a large space, including making programs easier to read, write, and maintain; allowing programmers to write more flexible and powerful ...
Pony
An open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language.
Rust Programming Language
A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Abstracting Definitional Interpreters
In this functional pearl, we examine the use of definitional interpreters as a basis for abstract interpretation of higher-order programming languages. As it turns out, definitional interpreters, especially those written in monadic style, can provide a nice basis for a wide variety of collecting semantics, abstract interpretations, symbolic executions, and their intermixings. But the real insight of this story is a replaying of an insight from Reynold's landmark paper, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages, in which he observes definitional interpreters enable the defined-language to inherit properties of the defining-language. We show the same holds true for definitional abstract interpreters. Remarkably, we observe that abstract definitional interpreters can inherit the so-called "pushdown control flow" property, wherein function calls and returns are precisely matched in the abstract semantics, simply by virtue of the function call mechanism of the defining-language. The first approaches to achieve this property for higher-order languages appeared within the last ten years, and have since been the subject of many papers. These approaches start from a state-machine semantics and uniformly involve significant technical engineering to recover the precision of pushdown control flow. In contrast, starting from a definitional interpreter, the pushdown control flow property is inherent in the meta-language and requires no further technical mechanism to achieve.
A glib line I have said for years: the first AI designed to disemploy programmers was called a compiler. It worked very well and caused explosive growth in programmer employment.
A glib line I have said for years: the first AI designed to disemploy programmers was called a compiler. It worked very well and caused explosive growth in programmer employment.— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) March 26, 2023