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

[Nathaniel Yazdani]

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.