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Comment by zvmaz

15 hours ago

Tangentially, a great interview with the creator of OCaml, Xavier Leroy [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cswiqrq6So

The entire series of interviews with various language designers by Ryan Peterman is really great and a highly recommended watch.

It gives an insight into how they thought/think and what we can learn from them.

While watching the series i was stuck by the fact that they often only focused/reiterated the conceptual basics and building on top of them in a step-by-step manner. Whereas if you watch interviews with programmers (even famous ones) you will often see a lot of fancy talk about the complicated features of the language etc.

I believe "Experts" have a way of modeling domain knowledge in their mind in such a way that they intuitively know what is the "wheat" and what is the "chaff". This is what we need to learn. Scheme can do a lot with a minimal language and so can C++ on the other end of the spectrum. So then what constitutes "Programming"? It is simply an expression of Intent via syntax supporting abstraction of state/behaviour.