Growing a Language
My friend
nix sent me a link to
Growing a Language, an old paper by
Guy Steele.
The paper has a very clever self-referential construction, and make some deep points about language design and programming to boot. It also touches on
why open source works,
Christopher Alexander, and writing prose in general.
It does however make an unfortunate and unexplained assertion that
for Java, a "mall" model of development is preferred over a "bazaar"
(as used by ESR in his famous essay
The Cathedral and the Bazaar). The paper has a slow start. The first time I started reading it I gave up after the first couple of paragraphs. It gets going on page 4, but you can't just skip to it. There's a method to the madness.
Posted by spot at April 24, 2004 02:58 PM