PLNews: Programming Language News

News, articles, announcements and information focusing on computer programming languages and their implementations.
December 28, 2005

"Thoughts on Language Design" Article by Guy Steele

Posted: 2005-12-28 22:22:00

Guy L. Steele, Jr., a co-creator of Scheme, has written an article entitled "Thoughts on Language Design: New challenges require new solutions".

He starts by recounting the debate that surrounded the goto statement in the 1960s and 1970s. He then proceeds to suggest that we may need future languages that "better support multiple threads of control and deal with the consequences of unordered actions." There is some discussion of languages where parallelism is the default, such as for control structures. Finally there is some focus on the actual presentation of source code, and the possibility of using Unicode to make languages easier to read and write.