[HN Gopher] Little Languages (1986) [pdf]
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       Little Languages (1986) [pdf]
        
       Author : ashish01
       Score  : 64 points
       Date   : 2024-07-17 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (staff.um.edu.mt)
 (TXT) w3m dump (staff.um.edu.mt)
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _"Little Languages" by Jon Bentley (1986) [pdf]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17881705 - Aug 2018 (17
       | comments)
        
       | AstroJetson wrote:
       | I loved his articles in the ACM. They are collected in a book
       | called Programming Pearls (https://www.amazon.com/Programming-
       | Pearls-2nd-Jon-Bentley/dp...) I also liked his second book
       | More:Programming Pearls (https://www.amazon.com/More-Programming-
       | Pearls-Confessions-C...)
       | 
       | Some of the same articles, but with updates and added reader
       | comments.
       | 
       | (I posted Amazon, but there is a ton on the used market)
        
         | DonaldPShimoda wrote:
         | > I loved his articles in the ACM.
         | 
         | This is a super minor correction on my part, but this is a
         | weird phrasing because "the ACM" is a huge organization that
         | publishes proceedings for a great range of interests --- it
         | isn't a venue in itself. The name of the venue you're looking
         | to reference is _Communications of the ACM_ , more commonly
         | just referred to as _Communications_ or CACM.
         | 
         | As an aside, _Communications_ is a sort of unique venue for
         | publication. The submissions are peer-reviewed, but the nature
         | of the submissions is more similar to a blog post or editorial
         | article than traditional papers you 'll find in other
         | proceedings from conferences and journals (and, indeed, the ACM
         | refers to CACM as a "magazine"). It makes for good "fun"
         | reading!
        
       | ashton314 wrote:
       | We are absolutely swimming in little languages. Consider these
       | languages:
       | 
       | - The language of regular expressions
       | 
       | - SQL queries
       | 
       | - In web frameworks, the language of routes
       | 
       | - etc.
       | 
       | Unfortunately we embed a lot of these languages as strings. This
       | is problematic because the language usually sees just opaque
       | strings--we can't apply any of our lovely static analysis tools
       | to these little embedded languages.
       | 
       | I'm doing some research in this area. We just got a paper
       | published at ECOOP. The big idea is that, with a little bit of
       | clever metaprogramming, we can help the type checker understand
       | these little languages better and give us more helpful hints or
       | execute more efficiently. This isn't a new idea, but no one has
       | given it a name before. Here's the blog post version:
       | https://lambdaland.org/posts/2024-07-15_type_tailoring/
       | 
       | (HN discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40990232
        
       | davidw wrote:
       | Tcl was, or is, a nice way to add a language that's very flexible
       | and customizable to a larger system. It's pretty easy to create
       | your own DSL's with it.
        
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