Articulating the ineffable. Programming language theory 
cognitive psychology. PhD @Stanford
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Morten Kromberg presents the post-1978 history of APL. The APL ecosystem initially split around the question: when nesting items in arrays, do those items need to be explicitly "boxed" or not?pic.twitter.com/Ijrm6SZhwV
Dozens of flavors of APL sprung up in this period. APL was definitively an idea up for grabs, and not a language steered by a single person or org. Probably most like SQL in that regard.pic.twitter.com/8UZwDVm0Vl
"APL is a notation as much a programming language, and it's important for subject matter experts to be able to use APL on the whiteboard and argue about it. I've seen open source APLs lead to fragmentation, which reduces the value of a notation."
Stefan Monnier and Michael Sperber presented the history of Emacs Lisp. One focus: modern Elisp has two distinct dialects, dynamically scoped (originally) and statically scoped (added later).
"Back then, dynamic scoping was considered efficient. Lexical scoping seemed kind of expensive to implement. Lexical scoping requires the creation of closures." Same underlying reason as Logo, but different conclusion (performance vs. learnability)https://twitter.com/wcrichton/status/1406999997527191552 …
Q: Advice for systems adding dynamic scoping, eg React contexts? A: Picolisp creator said: "Modularity is the ability to reach into a system's guts and make it do what you want." Unconventional, but not wrong. Dynamic scoping enables users to make Emacs do what you want done.
...The trend at confs like ICFP has been unbreakable abstractions. But systems that result from that, esp editors, are not as flexible at runtime like Emacs. But the balance is hard to find and keep the system comprehensible.
Don Syme presents the history of F#. Frames it through the lens of the OOP wave of late 90s, and how FP advocates within MSR continued to push for language innovation beyond objects. Found initial F# made for 10x smaller code than C#. 56k LOC for braces! 3k null checks!pic.twitter.com/zur4byC6To
"When I got to Microsoft, I was told in no uncertain terms that the word 'compositional' was not in the MS vocabulary. And we have blown that apart at MS."
Q: Aspects of C#/.NET that are hindering F#? A: The big way we suffered is that F# did not have a strong Linux story during the rise of Linux and subsequently the cloud. That's crucial.
Earlier, several HDL designers discussed Verilog and its ilk. "When we discuss Moore's law, we focus on semiconductor technology... but just as important are the tools used to design the chips. Chips in 1978 were designed with pencil and paper."pic.twitter.com/HdGQ5vL1La
Sneak peek into the intensive process of naming a language (tag yourself, I'm "logol")pic.twitter.com/92tIyks0oY
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Eg for complect, I was trying to give more specificity to an old notion, coupling, that system designers understand intuitively.