Advogato: Blog for rkrishnan

Guy Steele on learning programming languages

Posted on October 26, 2013 by rkrishnan

About an year ago, while casually browsing, I wandered into Oracle Labs website and found Guy Steele’s page. If you don’t know who Guy Steele is, perhaps watching this video is a good start. In summary, Guy Steele was a student of Prof. Gerald Sussman and they together invented the legendary language SCHEME. I am a big fan of Scheme and its simplicity. I think I have watched almost every Guy Steele lecture videos freely available out there. In particular, I am a big fan of the Dan Friedman 60th birthday lecture, “Growing a language” lecture and so on. Youtube is your friend.

Coming back to the topic, I couldn’t resist emailing him and just say that I am a big fan of Scheme. With his permission, I am reproducing the email conversation we had and his great advice.

  > On Jul 6, 2012, at 6:53 AM, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan wrote:
> 
> Thank you for the reply. Delighted to see a reply from you. I think I
> have watched all the public videos of talks you have given on various
> things Scheme related (Growing a language, Dan Friedman 60th birthday
> lecture etc) and am a big fan! Scheme has totally changed my
> perception about programming. I still have to learn a lot of things
> more deeply but I think I finally found something that I seem to
> really like -- Programming languages and thanks to you and your work
> for that. I also plan to read the "Lambda, the Ultimate" AI memos too.
> Enough to keep me busy for the next few years! Any advice from you in
> my endeavour in Programming language research will be highly
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks again
> Ramakrishnan

The main advice I have is what you are already doing: keep reading!
The "Lambda, the Ultimate" papers have held up pretty well over the years,
I think, but there is much, much more.  I recommend any paper that has
Phil Wadler, Simon Peyton Jones, or Charles Leiserson as a co-author.
Also, study more programming languages.  Any will do, but there seem
to be a lot of good ideas nowadays in Haskell, Clojure, Python, and Scala.
You are much better off, I think,  knowing three good programming languages
than one really great one.  And read code in each of these languages, maybe the
code for their standard libraries as well as an application.  Good luck!

Yours,
Guy Steele

Syndicated 2013-10-26 00:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

8 Dec 2013 rkrishnan » (Journeyer)