Guy Steele's keynote at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference on "Growing a Language" discusses the importance of and issues associated with designing a programming language that can be grown by its users.<p>Link to PDF
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
"This is the nub of what I want to say. A language design can no longer be a thing. It must be a pattern -- a pattern for growth -- a pattern for growing the pattern for defining
the patterns that programmers can use for their real work and their main goal."<p>One of the most incredible CS things I've ever taken in.
Link to PDF
<a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf</a>
Guy Steele and Dick Gabriel gave a talk at HOPL a few years back. Another great talk. It lacked the insight of this one, but purely a joy... CS poetry. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the talk online anywhere.
reaction; the action caused by an action<p>While I was writing a reaction, I thought I should use only words with one syllable, and words defined in his talk.<p>information; facts learned.
realize; be aware of<p>Other than the great information he gave, writing this reaction taught me how hard it is to write in this style, let alone talk for a hour. I also realized how much long words I use.
"If you give a person a fish, he can eat for a day. If you teach a person to fish, he can eat his whole life long. If you give a person tools, he can make a fishing pole—and lots of other tools! He can build a machine to crank out fishing poles." That's the essence of programming.
The famouse Statemant: "A Language needs to be designed to grow" is great. Gilad Braha (maker of the Newspeak) top this statmend by saying: "Languages need to be designed to take stuff away". Witch is pretty cool but much, much harder to do.
It would be fun use hebrew this way, in a talk about dynamic languages including tuples.<p>I don't know enough to take it on though, just thinking of that numerology scene from Pi.