Online / 6 & 7 February 2021

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Imagining the Ideal Language for Writing Free Software


Many programming languages have been explicitly designed to solve the problems of "programming in the large" – that is, to make it easier for large groups of software developers to work together, despite differences in skill, experience, or history with the project. Languages following this pattern are an excellent fit for the sort of large software companies that typically sponsor their development. However, they are not necessarily a good fit for typical free/open-source software projects, which face different challenges and constraints. If a language were designed from the ground up to fit the free-software usecase, what would it look like? What values would it maximize, what tradeoffs would it be willing to make, and what would it be like to program in every day?

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Photo of Daniel Sockwell Daniel Sockwell

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