“Ideas don’t spring fully formed from the mind of an individual. Ideas emerge between people.” Avdi Grimm, in his closing keynote at Southeast Ruby, told how when he sets out to write a talk, he wants to go out on his deck and walk back and forth until he squeezes the ideas out of his …
We don’t program in a language, these days: we program in systems. I may write Clojure, with ring and schema and clj-http and clj-time and test.check and lein and jetty and many more inclusions. I may write Scala, with akka OR with scalaz and Shapeless, or a weird combination. We never programmed in a language: …
John Backus (pdf) distinguishes two parts of a programming language: “First, its framework which gives the overall rules of the system, and second, its changeable parts, whose existence is anticipated by the framework but whose particular behaviour is not specified by it.” The framework part is all the built-in language constructs. The changeable parts are …