[Pl-seminar] 2/17 Seminar: Darius Blasband: "Grow your own language: The YAFL story"

[Nathaniel Arfaa Yazdani]

Reminder that this is tomorrow!

> From: Nathaniel Arfaa Yazdani <yazdani.n at northeastern.edu>
> Sent: Monday, February 10, 2020 11:03 PM
> Cc: pl-seminar at lists.ccs.neu.edu <pl-seminar at lists.ccs.neu.edu>
> Subject: 2/17 Seminar: Darius Blasband: "Grow your own language: The YAFL story"
>
> NUPRL Seminar Presents
>
> Darius Blasband
> Raincode
>
> 11:00AM to 12:30PM
> Monday, February 17th, 2020
> Room 366 WVH (www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)
>
> Grow your own language: The YAFL story
>
> Abstract
>
> This talk tells the rather uncommon story of the co-evolution of my company, Raincode,
> with a home-grown programming language, YAFL. The two are intimately intertwined:
> Raincode would crumble if YAFL was to disappear, and YAFL would have no reason to
> exist if Raincode was to stop its activities. YAFL is a strongly-typed object-oriented
> language originally designed and implemented a quarter of century ago. Our story starts
> with YAFL’s inception, its design, our motivations (including the usual fantasies of world
> domination) and the technical underpinnings and some key implementation decisions.
> Our story is rooted in the real-world where pragmatics reign. I will argue that out design
> choices and implementation decisions have converged to give YAFL its true value, and, that
> the fruits of growing our own language are well worth the maintenance burden. The talk
> will argue that YAFL is a non-DSL, and touch on the good ideas as well as the lousy ones. I
> will discuss how to evolve a language over time by judiciously adding, as well as removing,
> features. Above all, it is story about people. The language designer, its implementors, its
> first users, even its customers are the main. Their interplay sheds a light on how languages
> are created and maintained.
>
> Bio
>
> Darius Blasband was born in 1965 and has a PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His
> focus is legacy code modernization, articulated around compilers for legacy languages. He
> founded Raincode (https://www.raincode.com), and designed its core technology. Above all,
> Darius is a geek. Building software systems is what he likes best—after his family, chocolate,
> and on par with music.