An annual conference sounds like a great opportunity to discuss design goals of languages and long term goals - I am a much less ambitious man than you. I'm just thinking of small scope examples, to name 3 on top of my head:
- The iteration protocol (PHP had a similar lengthy discussion about something like our `return` - talking to the relevant people there would have helped). - RegExp.escape's escape set, other languages had to make that choice and speaking to people involved could help bring in insights. - async functions, C#, Hack, Dart and Python all had to solve similar design issues to what ES does and probably have a lot of interesting insights. Most of the new features we're discussing have other language parallels. I'm aware that champions and other people involved do a lot of research and it takes a lot of time - but as Bob from PHP internals said, very often the delicate detail is lost in the documentation and speaking to the people involved is immensely useful. I think setting up a conference is a lot more work then getting 3 people from each side on IRC every now and then, but I'm not very experienced with either. Another alternative brought up is a closed mailing list or discourse board. On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 9:35 PM, Allen Wirfs-Brock <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jul 1, 2015, at 5:37 AM, Benjamin Gruenbaum wrote: > > So, this is something that has been bothering me for a while now. > > The TC, and the mailing list is full of some really smart people. However, > smart people can overlook things too and smart people can spend months in a > debate that other people already thought about. > > Other languages have open processes too, other languages have mailing > lists and working groups and much of the same discussions we do. > > ----- > > I think it would be really awesome if a small subgroup of the TC could do > a monthly or bi-monthly chat (hangouts, skype, in person, whatever) with > working groups from other languages. > > I have talked to several PHP-Internals people and they are generally in > favour. Knowing some of these people they have a ton to contribute - if we > could save just a single debate or understand a domain better it'd be worth > it IMO. > > > It sounds to me that a better fit would be a small annual conference whose > attendees are primarily working language designers and implementors. Today > most conferences either are exclusively academic (most ACM conferences) or > are commercial (or at least semi-commercial) performance venues where > "experts" talk to a non-expert audience. This hasn't always been the case, > once upon a time there were subject area conferences where (mostly) > non-academic practitioners in some computing subject area could gather to > talk about recent experiences and share knowledge that advanced the > practical state of the art of the subject area. > > There probably are still some conferences like this, but the only one I > can think of relating to programing languages is Microsoft's Lang.net > /lang.next (https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT ). I helped > organize the first lang.net conference and one of it's goals was to try > to working language designers/implementors. While I recommend attending a > lang.next, if the opportunity arises, I think it's organization is a bit > too Microsoft-centric, the conference a bit too small, and its occurrence a > bit too infrequent (will there be a lang.next 2016??). But perhaps it > could be liberated from Microsoft's dominance if there were additional > interested sponsor organizations. > > Allen > > > >
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