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Computer Science - Brian Kernighan on successful language design

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN cites it as a practical talk on language design and for background on awk from one of its authors.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
University of Nottingham
Topic
programming language design
Format
lecture
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
8
Recommendation years in dataset
2015–2022

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • This is an excellent talk on designing successful programming language by Brian Kernighan [1]. In the beginning of the lecture he did show a picture of the Tower of Babel depicting plethora programming languages as it's appeared in the cover of Communications of the ACM …

    teleforce on Hacker News · 2022-12
    In Most(LY Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)

  • There's a great talk by bwk where he complains about exactly this kind of behavior...before admitting that anything useful in a language will be abused in order to do silly things. [VIDEO] I'll admit, I'm no fan of Python, but this has little to do …

    chrisfinazzo on Hacker News · 2018-05
    In Shell Style Guide

  • All talks by Bret Victor are great, they are listed on his websites but they are more concerned with the future of programming than old languages: [LINK] On the topic of language design, there is also this talk by Brian Kernighan which gives good practical …

    ad404b8a372f2b9 on Hacker News · 2022-12
    In Most(LY Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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