THE VIDEO SHELF · programming language design
OOPSLA Conference: Growing a Language
Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.
Why HN readers recommended it
Treated as a must-watch for language designers, and cited whenever extensibility and language size are debated.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Computer History Museum
- Topic
- programming language design
- Format
- talk
- Level
- intermediate
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 6
- HN mentions in dataset
- 13
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2020–2026
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.
In case anyone hasn't seen this most excellent talk on this topic, I highly recommend: Guy Steele - Growing a Language (OOPSLA '98) [VIDEO]
nfoz on Hacker News · 2022-01
In In defense of complicated programming languagesThis is an excellent talk, and exactly where my mind went, too. I might suggest watching this upload of it instead, to avoid capture errors in the older upload: [VIDEO]
MrDOS on Hacker News · 2022-08
In The Up-Goer Five Text EditorFor some reason that version has a large number of audio glitches. But very recently the Computer History Museum published a cleaned-up version: [VIDEO] Good!
jdontillman on Hacker News · 2020-09
In Growing a Language (1998) [video]
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.
