At OOPSLA 2005, a video of Guy Steeles' keynote from OOPSLA 98 was shown at the lunch times. It was a beautifully, and cleverly crafted talk. In his talk he defines all words over one syllable (in terms of words of one syllable or words that he's already defined). His talk is about language design - whether languages should be "small" or "large" - and describes how languages should be designed to grow.
It's in the context of Java, but it's a bit ironic that Java is so limited in the ways in which it can be extended by users, and in how large it is compared to really well designed languages like Smalltalk or Self (meow - that sounds more harsh than I mean). Guy Steele identified a couple a features of Java that he wanted to add - generics (now in Java) and operator overloading. It's certainly worth watching, even by people not involved with software, for it's wonderfully crafted presentation.
Here's a written version of the talk.
Posted by ivan at October 22, 2005 11:33 AM