[HN Gopher] Growing a Language [pdf] (1998)
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       Growing a Language [pdf] (1998)
        
       Author : ColinWright
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2025-04-14 16:34 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (langev.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (langev.com)
        
       | ColinWright wrote:
       | This is the PDF of the talk given here:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
       | 
       | It's Guy Steele[0]'s keynote at the 1998 ACM[1] OOPSLA[2]
       | conference.
       | 
       | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.
       | 
       | [1] Association for Computing Machinery
       | 
       | [2] The 13th annual ACM SIGPLAN[3] Conference on Object-Oriented
       | Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications.
       | 
       | [3] SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special
       | Interest Group (SIG) on programming languages.
        
         | kreetx wrote:
         | This is one of the talks I watch over and over - though it has
         | computer science value then its entertainment value is much
         | much higher still.
        
         | gjvc wrote:
         | The OOPSLA 1997 keynote was a banger as well. That was truly an
         | exciting time.
        
       | senkora wrote:
       | > An operator can be overloaded in C plus plus, but right now
       | operators in the Java pro- gramming language can not be
       | overloaded by the programmer, though names of methods may be
       | overloaded. I would like to change that
       | 
       | It's a shame that he lost this battle. Operator overloading
       | really does make it a lot nicer to design certain kinds of
       | libraries.
        
         | chubot wrote:
         | FWIW another thing that Guy Steele advocated was value types,
         | which as I understand it is ongoing work:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Valhalla_(Java_languag...
         | 
         | https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/
         | 
         |  _I have said in the past, and will say now, that I think it
         | would be a good thing for the Java programming language to add
         | generic types and to let the user define overloaded operators._
         | 
         | He did get the generic types though, I think that was well over
         | a decade ago now
        
           | roetlich wrote:
           | Or you could use C# and get all of those features.
        
           | steveklabnik wrote:
           | > I think that was well over a decade ago now
           | 
           | This was in Java 5, in 2004. So two decades!
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | i mean okay but also it makes it impossible to have an open
         | source ecosystem with shared libraries because suddenly things
         | dont mean the same thing in one system vs another. i was
         | interviewing at Jane St and realized their OCaml completely
         | doesnt work with the rest of the world - and its fine if you're
         | Jane St i guess but that really sucks for the "health" of a
         | language ecosystem.
        
           | Someone wrote:
           | Why would                 a + b
           | 
           | suffer more from this than                 plus(a,b)
           | 
           | ? In both cases, libraries will only clash if both define a
           | function with the same name taking an _A_ and a _B_. The only
           | difference is that it is called _+_ in the former case, and
           | _plus_ in the latter.
        
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