Events

Talk @ GeekOUT Tallinn: Language Design Trade-Offs (Kotlin and Beyond)

This week I’m speaking at GeekOUT Tallin, and my colleagues Mikhail Vink and Sergey Karashevich are holding a 15-minute DEMO on Thursday, telling you about cool stuff in JetBrains’ IDEs.

The topic of my talk is “Language Design Trade-Offs (Kotlin and Beyond)“, so one can summarize it as “why designing languages is SO interesting”.

Abstract

If your programming language is small, you’re probably born before 1950, and your first computer was bigger than your present apartment. And even those languages are not so small. One spends quite some time to master a programming language. Why?

Because there are very many decisions “compressed” into the form of a language. Nothing limits a programmer’s imagination like a compiler, and nothing limits a language design like a real world with all of its “legacy”, compatibility concerns, performance limitations, generations-old habits and leaky abstractions.

This talk is about tradeoffs: why we, as language designers, do (or rather did) this and not that.

See you on Friday, 14 June 2013 11:30 @ Room 2

UPD:

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