Ask HN: What are the best references on language design

4 points·ljw1001··3 comments

There is a lot of work on language implementation (parsing, compilers, etc.), but I haven't found many good sources on the aesthetics of language design. What makes a good language good? Has anyone approached language design from a usability standpoint? Thanks.

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Here's a few things I found myself, if anyone is interested:

Book: MacLellan's Principles of Programming Languages. The principles are listed here: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2006/06/24/bruce-j-maclennans-pro...

Book: Masterminds of Programming. Interviews with the designers of many languages. Not all equally good.

Papers and Media: History of Programming Languages, proceedings 1-3. The third one includes video. (Paywalled -need an ACM subscription) Many classic articles including Kay on Smalltalk, Richie on C, McCarthy on Lisp. Iverson on APL. More recent languages include Haskell, Self, Lua. Many obscure but interesting languages like ZPL, Beta, Modula, etc.

Brian Kernighan's talk on How to succeed in language design without really trying [1] was referenced in his recent interview on the software engineering daily podcast.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU

[2] http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/01/06/language-desi...

I think the way to understand design aesthetics would be to investigate actual languages. Probably the place to start is with languages that where people talk about the design. Go, Ruby, Clojure, Perl 6, Forth, Scala come to mind as languages where I've heard their primary developer talk about design aesthetics in particular.

Good luck.

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