For any audience, recommended as a keynote presentation.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --George Santanyana
Over the last decades, several new programming languages have emerged onto the scene, leaving many developers scrambling to understand their purpose. Even languages that we think we know (looking at you, JavaScript) turn out to have some interesting ideas and concepts buried away inside them that seem to be the sole province of the "master" developer. But strangely enough, none of these "new" languages are actually all that new. Most of them are a small step on top of older languages that have been around for decades. And, it turns out, if you understand some of these "influencer" languages, you understand what the influence is--well beyond your current language, in fact.
This is the province of the historian: Studying the past to understand the future. It's simultaneously easier and harder than you think. And in this keynote, that's exactly what we're going to do: Look at languages past, to understand languages future.
Published on 30 April 2024