Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote

[eli rosenberg <address@hidden>]

Lisp Guru, Yahoo! Store creator, and language designer
Paul Graham gave the keynote speech at PyCon.  PyCon
was a great little conference for Python Language 
enthusiastists, with a theme of popularizing the
Python language and philosophy.  Though I did not
spend much time at PyCon, I did have the pleasure
of hearing Paul's speech, so I will briefly
mention a few of the ideas he covered.  The terminology
I use is not necessarily the same as Paul's, as I didn't
take notes.

* The speech centered around the future of programming 
languages, specifically imagining what programming
will be like in 100 years.  

* We are still using paradigms and methods from the 1950s,
so it is plausible that a creation from today
would be around in 100 years.

* Paul is critical of Java, of high level languages with 
strong static typing, and believes lower level languages 
should be saved for tasks requiring low level control or 
extreme efficiency.  Even in the far future, some 
programs will be written in low level languages and
some programs will be written in Fortran (he joked).
Somebody will always have an application that requires
maximum computing power.

* Programming will be more oriented towards telling
the computer what to do, rather than the computational
steps required to achieve it.

* Programming languages should be for programmers!

* Very high level abstraction will probably come at
the expense of efficiency, but computers will eventually
be a million times faster, so inefficiency is fine.
In fact, inefficiency is good because programmer
time is cheaper than computer time or computer power.

* Using a core set of axioms and building abstractions
from these axioms may be a good way to achieve high
level abstraction, layers of abstraction, or varying
types of abstraction (domain specific). 

* Data will have a more natural appearance, leaving
details of the representation to the implementors.
For example, eventually you will not often bother
with the distinctions between arrays, lists, and strings,
or perhaps even numbers. 

* LISP is good, Macros are good, and SUVs are ugly,
because they solve an ugly problem- how to make a
minivan look masculine.

* There is really no such thing as a 'scripting language.'




-eli