An Essay on Language Design

Interests in programming language design:

• Concurrency abstractions (actors, channels, joins, STM, ...)
• Distributed computing abstractions (remote references, failure handling, ...)
• Parallel programming abstractions (data parallelism, fork/join, MapReduce, ...)
• Asynchronous and event-driven computations (futures, promises, reactive programming, ...)
• Object models (class-based, prototype-based, ...)
• Object composition (mixins, traits, ...)
• Language "symbiosis" (e.g. interoperation of dynamic languages and the JVM)
• Reflection (mirrors, intercession, meta-objects, ...)
• Meta-programming (macros, quasiquoting, ...)
• Psychology of programming (Green's cognitive dimensions of notations)

Talk to me about: AmbientTalk, Javascript, Erlang, Clojure, Scheme, Self, Ruby, Java, Occam, Fortress, X10, Chapel, ...

-- TomVanCutsem - 12 May 2011