154: Why all the Curly Braces? with Scott Wlaschin

Three Devs and a Maybe

In this weeks episode we are lucky to have Scott Wlaschin back on the show to discuss his most recent talk ‘Four Languages from Forty Years Ago’. We start off by talking about why the 1970’s was such an influential decade for language design. This leads us on to highlight what a programming language fundamentally is, and explain the many different paradigms that are present. From here, we explain the issue with throwing out the design phase completely when building software, and the interesting points made in Richard Gabriel’s ‘Worse is Better’ essay. Finally, we try to make sense of why all popular programming languages today follow a very similar style, and what is with all the curly braces?!

Show Links

• Scott Wlaschin on Twitter
• F# for fun and profit
• Four Languages from Forty Years Ago
• Four Languages From Forty Years Ago (Slides)
• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks - The Pragmatic Bookshelf
• Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks - The Pragmatic Bookshelf
• Smalltalk - Wikipedia
• ‘Epigrams in Programming’ by Alan J. Perlis
• Sudoku Solver in Prolog
• A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout
• Garbage collection - Wikipedia
• ‘Worse is Better’ by Richard Gabriel
• Introvert and extrovert programming languages
• ReasonML