A great talk from Paul Phillips, former Typesafe employee and Scala compiler developper, about language restriction and beyond. Some quotes:
- If it isn’t straightforward to modify, it’ll never be any good. It’ll never be fast. It’ll never be correct.
- If you can do whatever you want, then we have to assume you’re gonna do whatever you want. Then we can optimize nothing.
- There is no such things as a general purpose
- Unnecessary expressiveness is the enemy. True power is in restriction.
- Why is the canonical representation of code a string?! String is not a good basis for anything. It’s just what you edit. The AST is the important part.