Growing a Language, by Guy Steele

Why HN readers recommended it

HN considers it one of the best technical talks ever and cites it in discussions of language design, small cores and extensibility.

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

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Bill Pugh

Topic

programming language design

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

11

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2014–2026

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.

• He gave a brilliant talk about it: "Growing a Language"[1]. The idea is to make languages that grow —ones that provide a small, uniform core that can be extended by the user. Ideally, these extensions feel like first-class citizens: things added by users should feel …

• Not a paper, but one of my favorite talks [VIDEO] Growing a Language by Guy Steele (co-inventory of Scheme). Brilliant speech about how to grow languages and why it's necessary. Languages that can be grown by the programmer, like Lisp or Smalltalk are better than …

• Haven’t read it but remembered this paper being mentioned in Guy Steele’s fabulous “Growing a language” talk [0]. I don’t want to give anything away about the talk (which is one of my absolute favorites), but Steele says about the title of this paper: “... …