Masterminds of Programming

Foreword

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE DESIGN IS A FASCINATING TOPIC. There are so many programmers who think they can design a programming language better than one they are currently using; and there are so many researchers who believe they can design a programming language better than any that are in current use. Their beliefs are often justified, but few of their designs ever leave the designer’s bottom drawer. You will not find them represented in this book.

Programming language design is a serious business. Small errors in a language design can be conducive to large errors in an actual program written in the language, and even small errors in programs can have large and extremely costly consequences. The vulnerabilities of widely used software have repeatedly allowed attack by malware to cause billions of dollars of damage to the world economy. The safety and security of programming languages is a recurrent theme of this book.

Programming language design is an unpredictable adventure. Languages designed for universal application, even when supported and sponsored by vast organisations, end up sometimes in just a niche market. In contrast, languages designed for limited or local use can win a broad clientele, sometimes in environments and for applications that their designers never dreamed of. This book concentrates on languages of the latter kind.

These successful languages share a significant characteristic: each of them is the brainchild of a single person or a small team of like-minded enthusiasts. Their designers are masterminds of programming; they have the experience, the vision, the energy, the persistence, and the sheer genius to drive the language through its initial implementation, through its evolution in the light of experience, and through its standardisation by usage (de facto) and by committee (de jure).

In this book the reader will meet this collection of masterminds in person. Each of them has granted an extended interview, telling the story of his language and the factors that lie behind its success. The combined role of good decisions and good luck is frankly acknowledged. And finally, the publication of the actual words spoken in the interview gives an insight into the personality and motivations of the designer, which is as fascinating as the language design itself.

—Sir Tony Hoare

Sir Tony Hoare, winner of an ACM Turing Award and a Kyoto Award, has been a leader in research into computing algorithms and programming languages for 50 years. His first academic paper, written in 1969, explored the idea of proving the correctness of programs, and suggested that a goal of programming language design was to make it easier to write correct programs. He is delighted to see the idea spread gradually among programming language designers.