I find myself in Germany, at a Dagstuhl conference on Foundations for Scripting Languages and with a with a bit time to ponder things. For example, why do we label some languages as Scripting Languages and some not? The first part of the answer is easy...

If you want to sell your great new programming language to me for use in my day job, perhaps in 2020, it had better provide me with a way to define functions. Now, hopefully most of you will be mystified by this requirement. Isn’t that a bit like saying...

  Well, its been over two years since I’ve last posted something here. In the meantime I’ve learnt perhaps more than I wanted to know about the gnarly details of HTML5 and how to make JavaScript run fast (or at least faster). And since my first post...

As the infrequent nature of my blog postings make pretty clear, I do have a day job that does not involve full time musing about programming languages. One of the things I do is to write compiler after compiler. Somewhat like old king Midas, everything...

In my previous posts I’ve wondered about the future viability of static typing, arrays and loops. Can I get any more out of touch with reality? Well, what about numbers? Computers are number crunchers, so how can we possibly program a computer with...

If anything is more fundamental to programming languages than arrays, it would be loops. You can probably count the number of programming languages that dispense with loops on the fingers of one hand. Yet loops are problematic. Loop constructs are...

Should arrays get axed from future languages? In some ways the question is shocking. Arrays have been built into programming languages since ancient times. Arrays provide the foundation for many data structures and form the subject of an entire chapter...

I suspect that most people involved in the creation of programming languages like to think of themselves as (intelligent) designers. We have the Programming Language Design and Implementation conference, programming language designers, design documents...

In my previous posting I speculated that compile time type checkers as we know them today may fall by the wayside in favor of something that looks and feels a lot more like the dynamically typed languages. One of the statements I made, “ If you store...

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in dynamically typed languages, with quite a lot of buzz about JavaScript, Python and Ruby. Could it be that one of these languages will rise to be the champion of the next decade? I would be a...

In previous posts, I’ve speculated that one of the necessary ingredients for the ascent of a new “champion” programming language is that the overall computing market should expand significantly. This seems to have been the case in the past, but will...

In my last post I speculated that we can infer from history that a necessary precondition for toppling our existing programming language champions is that there should be a significant expansion in computing. A number of reasons come to mind why this...

I hope so. If history is anything to go by it seems inevitable. I have been in the computing field since the mid seventies, mostly in an academic/research/advanced developement context. I've have used many programming languages over the years, but...