PL folks should go subscribe to ! It's focused on comparing design choices from a wide variety of different programming languages, with a particular focus on ergonomics and usability. It's really valuable stuff!
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For years, I've personally considered one of my main interests in programming languages to be ergonomics. But I haven't used the term (at least not often?) on my channel. I guess my interest stands out, anyway. And thanks for the kind words!
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No worries! It definitely shines through! You treat this stuff more like appreciating architecture and industrial design, rather than attempting to force it into a science. And I think that's important.
Leo White has some relevant thoughts on this here: signalsandthreads.com/language-desig.
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Like I think there's definitely value in looking at usability studies and theoretical stuff (maybe ideas for future videos there?), but there's also plenty of room for appreciating programming languages from a perspective of aesthetics and beauty.
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In fact, more than plenty of room - I think there's a significant lack of people doing this in a public setting that reaches a wide audience. And that makes your stuff even more valuable!
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Yeah, since I'm not a PL researcher at all, that probably affects my perspective, but I want to study it more so I know that world, too. I've done research but not in PL. And of course, there was this recent editorial: blog.sigplan.org/2020/09/29/pl-
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And I'd really like sometime to study up on notation and make a video or 3 to help me and others better make sense of PL academic papers. Notation like this and such: siek.blogspot.com/2012/07/crash-
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Anyway, thanks much for your thoughts and the link!
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Actually, one more comment on the topic of usability studies. I'd have to look real close at any particular studies before I trusted them. Designing a meaningful formal experiment with results that actually extrapolate isn't easy.
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(But I'm still glad people work on such studies, anyway.)
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Yeah, it's notoriously difficult to design such studies. Interesting stuff here going through lots of the past attempts to judge whether static types are actually useful or not: danluu.com/empirical-pl/
There was some interesting stuff talking about empirical usability in this workshop too (it's pretty long though):
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also just wrote up an interesting piece on usability in PL research (which you might also already have seen). blog.sigplan.org/2020/10/27/wha
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