Creators of Python, Java, TypeScript, and SmallTalk Will Make a Joint Appearance for Charity (pydata.org) 45
The creators of four programming languages will appear together onstage for a historic conversation on September 19th.
- Adele Goldberg — Smalltalk
- Guido Van Rossum — Python
- Anders Hejlsberg — Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript
- James Gosling — Java
The announcement describes it as "a conversation about programming language design." The charity event brings together this unique group of computer science pioneers, unlike any event held before. These great minds come together for what will surely be a fantastic night of discussion as the panel delves into the past and future of programming language creation.
It's a fundraiser for two groups. NumFOCUS is a nonprofit charity sponsoring nearly all the major tools in the Python data science stack (including jupyter, numpy, pandas, and matplotlib), and it's also the group behind PyData conferences on open source data tools. And the Last Mile Education Fund offers financial support for low-income underrepresented students. It's being billed as the "inaugural charity event" of PyData Seattle.
This happened once before in 2019, when Puget Sound Programming Python arranged a four-way discussion with Python creator Guido van Rossum, Java creator James Gosling, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Anders Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript). They held a 90-minute discussion about "language design, the universe, and everything" as a benefit for CSforALL (a group promoting computer science classes at every grade level). During that discussion Gosling shared how Java "started out as kind of 'Do a better C', and it got out of control. The rest of the project really ended up just providing the context." And Anders Hejlsberg told the audience that TypeScript was inspired by massive "write-only" JavaScript code bases.
In their discussion on variable typing and its use in IDEs, Gosling mocked what he called the "real men use vi" mentality, leading to a lively back and forth. Perl's Larry Wall later acknowledged the importance of types and the careful consideration that went into implementing them for Perl 6, but also shared his unique perspective as a long-time designer of programming languages. "I think IDEs make language developers lazy."
At the end of the event, they all agreed that the most rewarding part of language design was the people — the excitement, the gratitude, and to see that community helping others in its community.
- Adele Goldberg — Smalltalk
- Guido Van Rossum — Python
- Anders Hejlsberg — Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript
- James Gosling — Java
The announcement describes it as "a conversation about programming language design." The charity event brings together this unique group of computer science pioneers, unlike any event held before. These great minds come together for what will surely be a fantastic night of discussion as the panel delves into the past and future of programming language creation.
It's a fundraiser for two groups. NumFOCUS is a nonprofit charity sponsoring nearly all the major tools in the Python data science stack (including jupyter, numpy, pandas, and matplotlib), and it's also the group behind PyData conferences on open source data tools. And the Last Mile Education Fund offers financial support for low-income underrepresented students. It's being billed as the "inaugural charity event" of PyData Seattle.
This happened once before in 2019, when Puget Sound Programming Python arranged a four-way discussion with Python creator Guido van Rossum, Java creator James Gosling, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Anders Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript). They held a 90-minute discussion about "language design, the universe, and everything" as a benefit for CSforALL (a group promoting computer science classes at every grade level). During that discussion Gosling shared how Java "started out as kind of 'Do a better C', and it got out of control. The rest of the project really ended up just providing the context." And Anders Hejlsberg told the audience that TypeScript was inspired by massive "write-only" JavaScript code bases.
In their discussion on variable typing and its use in IDEs, Gosling mocked what he called the "real men use vi" mentality, leading to a lively back and forth. Perl's Larry Wall later acknowledged the importance of types and the careful consideration that went into implementing them for Perl 6, but also shared his unique perspective as a long-time designer of programming languages. "I think IDEs make language developers lazy."
At the end of the event, they all agreed that the most rewarding part of language design was the people — the excitement, the gratitude, and to see that community helping others in its community.
"Apperance" (Score:2, Insightful)
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Well now that Kotlin is a first class language on Android, Java has no place on mobile and should burn in hell, so that couldn't be it.
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I think there’s a name for people like that. Ah yes, a snowflake.
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AFAIK there is NO advocacy group for boys and men to become programmers.
But there are many horrible, well-funded sexist organisations, like this one and code.org, that are trying to discourage boys from pursuing STEM education.
The manhate must stop.
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AFAIK there is NO advocacy group for boys and men to become programmers.
The point is there doesn't need to be one at this point given that 82% of all CS graduates are ALREADY men and boys.
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Good.
So you agree these groups don't want more CS graduates, they want to take CS from men who want to do it and give it to women who don't.
That is disgusting, hateful sexism, and why these groups are evil.
Well said. While my wife was walking out to get the mail this afternoon a woman came by and shoved an honorary CS degree in her face and ran away.
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So you agree these groups don't want more CS graduates, they want to take CS from men who want to do it and give it to women who don't.
That's not how this works. That's now any of this works. Generally speaking, college education programs are not a zero-sum game although it does get more like that as you get into the PhD research level where we tend to underfund basic research. Nobody is "taking it away" from anyone... they are just making sure women and girls perceive CS as a real option for them. That's not "sexism". It's "representation". I've worked in the software industry for decades. It's ALWAYS been a "sausage-fest" in every setti
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Unfortunately, you can bring a well-funded, manhating SJW to facts, but you can't make them think.
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Because I am opposed to sexism.
LOL! No, you're not. Who do you think you're fooling?
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You right-wing cranks are all the same. "I'm not sexist, I just believe all of these sexist things! You're the real sexist for pointing out my sexism!"
It's beyond pathetic.
You're not fooling anyone. We've figured out that silly little game of yours a long time ago.
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It's beyond pathetic.
You're not fooling anyone. We've figured out that silly little game of yours a long time ago.
It's a setup for a new reality TV show (Score:1)
Given that there will be minimal content due to various and sundry strikes, reality TV always steps in to fill the void (with another void). So here's the premise: these four people will be air-dropped on an island to fight it out for the last few cans of tuna fish only to discover that there are no can openers.
Opening jokes ... (Score:5, Funny)
"We were going to serve soft drinks, but Guido insisted on Tab and it's unavailable." :-)
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Long way to go for some soda. I'm hoping for a few more (lame) jokes... Like:
-- "Gosling: Actually, I prefer tea."
-- "It's hard starting a conversation with Adele, apparently she's not into small talk."
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Back when working at Sun, I did in fact see Gosling drinking tea in the cafeteria.
how long do they have to speak ? (Score:5, Funny)
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He's a different class to the others.
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... the java guy, he needs a two hour introduction before he even walks on the main stage.
That's not an introduction, it's an apologia.
Tethics (Score:3)
Why no-one from Common LISP ? (Score:2, Informative)
As an example:
A language whose designers understood that methods should be "owned by" (dispatched on the basis of)
the whole tuple of types of the arguments. i.e. methods are most straightforwardly owned by relation types, not object types.
As a special case, object types should only own methods which have no other argument.
This avoids multiplication of arbitrary choices of which object (argument
Re:Why no-one from Common LISP ? (Score:5, Informative)
Why have languages had to devolve from the simplicity and beauty of common lisp? Is it because many programmers cannot grasp the subtlety of more powerful ways to abstract both interface and implementation fragments?
Most of this is discussed in Worse is Better [dreamsongs.com] paper, if you didn't know about that one.
In the end, there were a lot of things about organizing a larger codebase that C/C++/Java put in place that LISP didn't have in terms of how files, libraries and such were organized.
Also, syntax turns out to be useful. As powerful as the code is data, data is code conventions are, s-expressions are just hard to read and too much LISP ended up being write-only code.
C, C++, Java then C#, Python and JavaScript all built up large set of libraries that are that enabled reuse in a coarse, but still effective manner. LISP never really got those libraries and that really hurt it overall.
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Because syntax matters.
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Agreed. The syntax (symbols) serve as quick visual way to know generally what kind of code it is. You don't have to map words to a mental dictionary to know the general purpose of a section, saving grok time.
Incidentally, the draft Moth language [reddit.com] is an attempt to provide kind of a hybrid between the ideas of C-style syntax and Lisp's uniformity. Note that moth is intended to be more of a kit for domain-specific-languages rather than one language.
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Pretty sure unless we've got a necromancer or unusually talented priest on hand, exhuming John McCarthy for a conference would probably be off the cards.
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McCarthy discovered Lisp. He always considered it to be like a form of mathematics, in the sense that we say mathematics exists inherently and aspects of it are discovered, not invented.
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Now there was a language that was a thing of beauty
Why does Common Lisp needs so many different kinds of variations of "let"?
http://www.lispworks.com/docum... [lispworks.com]
I'd take templates over this...
XKCD covers this only in standards... (Score:2)
XKCD covers this only in standards...
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
Create a "better XYZ language"...and the cycle continues.
JoshK.
Oh great (Score:2)
IDEs make language developers lazy (Score:3)
Hell yeah they do and I embrace the laziness.
- refactor anything
- extract local variable (only type on the right and let it fill in the rest)
- inline variable
- extract method
- lombok
- auto format
I type as little as necessary the let the IDE be my bitch. I use it for all the laziness possible.
Will Make a Joint Apperance for Charity (Score:2)
Holding "Will code for food" signs?
real men use vi (Score:1)
... and "IDEs make language developers lazy".
In my first job I worked at a UNIX shop where all the developers used the line editor ed, the only thing available. I was able to snag an early BSD distribution on tape. It wouldn't boot up but it had an executable binary of vi on it, so I put that on our shared VAX minicomputer. Woo, massive productivity boost! I showed it around and the ed users were reluctant to switch, real men use ed.
And vi was THE thing for another 10-15 years at least. Even now I can whiz
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I'd argue that in the VI vs Emacs war, Emacs won in the end. Even though vary few people actually use Emacs anymore , even I've given up the ghost on it, and I was a huge advocate for it, what Emacs gave us was the first full blown deep IDE with debuggers, linters, static analysers etc all baked into it (via plugins), all the way back in '76. So while EMACS itself didn't win, the concept behind it did in modern IDEs like IntelliJ, Eclipse and Visual Studio (And frankly a fully setup EMACS install does as mu
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I did know people who swore by Emacs. I never liked it for some reason, and still use vi on occasion for basic file examination and editing.
Typescript is shit (Score:2)
Doesn't surprise me it came from a guy involved with MS, J++, Pascal ðY
When typeless languages were invented they were considered a major breakthrough. You have AI that can do anything these days and you expect me to go back to explaining computers that numbers can't simply be numbers, there's a difference between a number 1 and the "1" keypress followed by a submit button click.