Invited Talk - Guy Steele

Guy L. Steele has been instrumental in designing and documenting several programming languages. Guy has served on accredited standards committees X3J11 (C language) and X3J3 (Fortran), and served as chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp). He was also a member of the IEEE committee that produced the IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language, IEEE Std 1178-1990. At Thinking Machines Corporation he co-developed the languages Connection Machine Lisp, C*, and Connection Machine Fortran. Whilst at Sun Microsystems (and now at Oracle) he has advised on the evolution of the Java programming language. He is author or co-author of five books: Common Lisp: The Language, C: A Reference Manual, The Hacker’s Dictionary, The High Performance Fortran Handbook, and The Java Language Specification. He has been given the Grace Murray Hopper Award (1988), the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (1996), and the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (2007).

[caleballen]

Genius research. A meta-analysis of the language with which linguists and computer scientists construct language for use.


What a breadth and depth of historical and applicable knowledge!

[samuellotz]

This should be mandatory viewing for anyone trying to read CS papers. The notation really hindered me after reading physics stuff first. Some additions:
- He didn't talk about geometric/Clifford algebras which are like more abstract quaternions
- this language does have some implementations more or less in the Racket dsl Redex, and also in the K framework

[mortenbrodersen]

Great talk. Nice to learn about the origins of the computer science languages we used today.

[joebloggsgogglebox]

Nice talk. I wonder if Guy Steele is aware of the Shen programming language (a lisp) which uses CSM code (sequent calculus) for defining types. Shen has an integrated prolog interpreter so I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to rewrite Guy Steele's code in Shen, thereby making it possible to directly import CSM from computer science papers into Shen.

[disk__]

18:47 zsh actually still has # and ## as postfix quantifiers in addition to the more common ksh/bash prefix notation, was the only time I had ever seen it until now lol

[marc-andrebrun]

very nice talk!
what I noticed, at 24'30, is that the Pascal notation, for describing types are readable and understandable by almost everyone;
the others one's, are uselessly combersome;
what is the main difference?
the universal power of a picture, far better than any "blabla".
people know it since they begin studying geometry : draw a picture to figure out the thing if far usefull than any gossip about the thing.
infortunatly, in CS, they don't learn how to draw picture : in all other sciences like physics, chemistry, biologie, drawing pictures in mandatory.

[bryanedds]

Imagine if Lisp used overlines rather than parentheses...

[PieceOfDuke]

9, 5k views. No comments. This stuff is real scary.

[AlexKnauth]

Borrowing an idea from quasiquoting comes at 52:52