PLATEAU 2010 Keynote

Title: The Fitness Function for Programming Languages: A Matter of Taste?

Programming languages elicit an almost religious fervor among their adherents. In contrast, researchers are increasingly searching for objective ways in which languages and related software artifacts can be evaluated. We see increased emphasis on rigorous criteria such as mathematical formalisms, extensive implementation experience or empirical studies. So, what makes a programming language or tool "good"? This talk gives a personal perspective on this question.

• Presentation Slides: PLATEAU 2010 Keynote Gilad Bracha (1.5 MB)

Speaker: Gilad Bracha

• Vice President at SAP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, USA

Bio

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language. He is currently a VP at SAP Labs in Palo Alto focusing on programming models for the cloud. Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Previous Keynote

• 2009: User Experience Design for Programming Languages and Tools - Larry Constantine