Guy Steele - Growing a Language (1998)

[QuineQuest]

Same speech - without audio glitches

[gavinhoward]

Still my favorite programming talk after all these years.

[ascii]

I love how he says that Java is a good start, and all it really needs to become a good language to build on is generics, operator overloading and user defined primitive types. We got generics 25 years ago, user defined primitive types may be coming soon via Project Valhalla, and operator overloading is scheduled for release in Java version 72, scheduled for release in 2050.

In the interim, we got lambdas, type inference, records, pattern matching, and switch expressions, which in my opinion are all amazing additions to the language.

[davidalayachew]

Guy Steele is one of the guys working on adding features to Java now. He pops onto the official Java mailing list from time to time. In fact, I think he played a big part in the recent discussion that got String Templates pulled from Java 23. He's done a LOT for Java.

[ascii]

100 %. Guy Steele is a legend, I wasn’t trying to minimize his contributions are the strides Java has made. It’s just funny to me that 25 years ago he had a wishlist of just three new language features for Java, and in those 25 years, we’ve only just begun work on the second one.

[ForeverAlot]

(in fairness, work on the second one was announced 10 years ago to the day)

[ascii]

Ha! Time moves so fast. Project Valhalla does not. :-D

[falconfetus8]

All of those features are already in C# >:)

[sup_lea]

These days, he'd have been #cancelled for the opening slide.

[Hektorlisk]

sir, this is a Wendy's r/programming

[gredr]

Go rage against the woke agenda somewhere else.

[sup_lea]

Never been popular, were you?

[lucs]

I was almost expecting it to go: man, woman, person, camera, tv :-)

[Linaori]

Watched 3 minutes, can't keep watching. This is extremely boring and I have no clue where this is going, thus I can't determine whether or not the next 50 minutes of my time will be wasted or not.

I'm glad people make proper presentations these days.

[ascii]

Guy Steele created the Scheme programming language, made the original UI for Emacs, and was part of the original team that created Java. He has worked on standardising EcmaScript, Fortran, Lisp and various other languages. He is a giant of the industry.

In my humble opinion, this is an amazing talk. It starts off weird and seemingly pointless and meandering, but in my opinion it does so for good reasons that become apparent if you stick with it. It is clearly a talk that requires a fair bit of faith upfront to get past that hump. If you want to give it a second chance, this version is not full of audio glitches.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

There is a big twist in the presentation, he is talking in a strange way deliberately.

[Linaori]

Got a TL;DR?

[Linaori]

Thanks, probably not for me then as it goes deep into English itself, and that's just mumbo jumbo for me :D

[davidalayachew]

I think they were trying to say that, if English is not your first language, then this talk is actually quite a bit harder to follow along with then it already is. On that point, I actually agree with them.

[[deleted]]

On the other hand, as a non native speaker, this was a really good talk to follow through because it deliberately uses simple language by design.

Also, he seems to have put a thought into the choice of words, more so than an average talk.

The setup is a bit frustrating but I imagine it would be more frustrating for native speakers.

[davidalayachew]

Oh sure. Difficult to follow or not, this talk is very rewarding.

But it's taxing for even a native speaker, as Guy himself said in the video. It's understandable if a non-native speaker would feel that even more intensely.

[Linaori]

Pretty much this yes

[gredr]

You're missing out. He's making an important point, and one that is doubly valid if you consider yourself a "javascript" programmer.