Jack of All Trades: Programming Languages

Of all the subjects in Computer Science to grab my interest, it is the study of programming languages that holds a place closest to my heart. Honestly, I am not entirely sure why. It probably hearkens back to my AP Computer Science course in high school. The particular assignment is not really important, but the class was allowed to implement it in either C or Pascal (the two languages being taught at MSMS at the time). After everyone turned in their assignments, which took several pages of code to accomplish, the professor showed us his implementation is a weird little language called Lisp. His version of the program took around 3/4 of a page &mash; probably 1/4 of the length of any of out versions. Seeing the simplicity of the code made me want to understand what it was that was unique about Lisp and sent me off to the library to get whatever I could about the strange little language.

Fast forward 13 years. Now, I have done a bit of serious programming in C and C++ and dabbled in Lisp, Forth, Python, SmallTalk, and Haskell. Each of these languages has their own pros and cons, but learning about their differences and their implementations fascinate me. So, I have bought several books on language (and compiler) implementation and have allowed my math studies to be directed towards the theory of Programming Languages. I lurk a good bit on Lambda the Ultimate, a programming languages weblog. I have played around with some simple implementations of Lisp and Forth clones and want to ultimate build one of those two on a machine from the ground up &mash; that is, make the language implementation into the Operating System for the computer, like it was in the old days.

I am interested in making programming more accessible to everyone. I am not sure what form that will take, but I believe that it come out of the concept I mentioned in my AI post about Fuzzy Literate Programming, something that does not yet exists but I bank will occur in the future.

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