Cross language discussion

[Allen Wirfs-Brock]

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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