programming language design

Interesting paper I found on usability and PL, abstract:

Why Undergraduates Should Learn the Principles of Programming Languages

This might be of interest to people that will be at OSCON 2010 or will be in Portland, Oregon on July 21-22.

Announcing the First Emerging Languages Conference

Robert Hieb, R. Kent Dybvig, and Carl Bruggeman. Representing Control in the Presence of First-Class Continuations. ACM SIGPLAN 1990 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 1990.

Joseph F. Miklojcik III, Phosphorous, The Popular Lisp.

We present Phosphorous; a programming language that draws on the power and elegance of traditional Lisps such as
Common Lisp and Scheme, yet which brings those languages into the 21st century by ruthless application of our “popular is better” philosophy into all possible areas of programming language design.

Hegarty, M. (1992). Mental animation: Inferring motion from static diagrams of mechanical systems.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 18(5) 1084-1102

Reaction-time and eye-fixation data are analyzed to investigate how people infer the kinematics of simple mechanical systems (pulley systems) from diagrams showing their static configuration.

Ivan Krstić, former director of One Laptop per Child and all around computer security guru, has a few humorous thoughts on the current intersection between security and programming language design in Languages and security: a short reading list.

If I had to grossly overgeneralize, I’d say people looking at language security fall in roughly three schools of thought:

A Simon Peyton Jones interview as part of the series The A-Z of Programming Languages that Naomi Hamilton has been putting together.

Posting this one to the front page, not because of any bias towards functional programming, so much as it stands on its own as interesting and insightful from the standpoint of programming language design and evolution.

SIGPLAN Workshop on Undergraduate Programming Language Curriculum.