2017 ACM PPoPP Keynote: It's Time for a New Old Language
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an excellent talk on notation problems, useful when reading papers or designing a new metalanguage.
What it is
Guy Steele's PPoPP 2017 keynote surveying the history of computer science metanotation, including BNF, inference rules, and overline notation. He argues the field's notations are inconsistent and fragmented.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2018 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends chubot · 2018-01 · on “A practitioner’s guide to reading programming languages papers”
This is great! I wish I had seen something like this years ago. Related: "It's Time for a New Old Language" by Guy Steele. [this video] He gives a history of metalanguage notations (for both language semantics and syntax, including regexes and CFGs). And then he criticizes the inconsistency that has cropped up in these notations over the years. The irony is that people who are formalizing precise semantics of programming languages do not agree on the syntax/semantics of the metalanguage. I guess this is what you notice when you read hundreds of programming language papers, as I'm sure Guy Steele has. ----- Also, does anyone know if what he refers to as "progress and preservation" are the same / r
Recommends chubot · 2020-08 · on “Formulog: ML + Datalog + SMT”
(Nice to see your work shared here :) ) I went through the corresponding videos last year: [LINK] [LINK] It was a great refresher as someone who once liked math but hasn't done much of it in ~20 years :) I had seen the blog posts, but there was some "color" in the videos that helped. For example I didn't realize that the fonts sometimes matter! Honestly, I still don't really read the notation, as I haven't had a strong reason to, but I feel it would be useful at some point. ---- For others, I also recommend this 2017 talk by Guy Steele It's Time for a New Old Language [this video] Because even people in the field seem to have problems with the notation. He also was asked about this work a few day
Recommends seg_lol · 2020-10 · on “Programming language notation is a barrier to entry”
Or ideas in general, should we ever gate keep the dissemination of ideas and knowledge? Innovation is more likely to occur when people cross disciplines and they can only do that if it is approachable, it is gradual and discoverable. Simple is hard, simplistic is easy. Someone is going to come back with essential vs accidental complexity [1] but we can always strive for simpler, more cohesive ways to exchange knowledge. How much of our current notation systems are essential? And when do they diverge for non-essential reasons? Computer systems form primarily around notation (language and syntax), so notation is definitely important [z] In the post the author mentions an excellent talk by Guy
Recommends porcoda · 2023-02 · on “Ask HN: Please Review My Metalanguage”
You might be interested in Guy Steele’s talk “It’s time for a new old language”. He talks about similar notations and the problem of inventing new ones (although most of his talk is about things other than BNF-like notations : he just talks about them for a bit in the beginning). It’s an interesting talk and is useful in thinking about proposing new notations. YouTube: [this video] If you search for the talk title you can find the PDF of the slides.