Re: Re: resources on PL design

Lots of earlier HOPL papers are experience writeups relevant to the 
question of PL design.  (For example, Alan Kay did a great history of 
Smalltalk, which talks about more than just the language design itself, 
and the language design was influenced by the other things.)

Separate from what's in HOPL, there are other related writeups floating 
around.  Most recently, I saw Kent Pitman did an interesting one on 
Common Lisp standardization (you'd also want look at whatever Guy Steele 
says about that, John McCarthy's HOPL on Lisp in general, and various 
other Lisp people's reports): 
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html

Closer to home, there's Scheme.  I don't know all that's currently 
written up about Scheme history (and it's ongoing, including with RnRS 
and various implementations), but most of the players are still around, 
and they should probably be encouraged to write if they haven't 
already.  Olin Shivers wrote an account of T: 
http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

Then there's various papers and writeups on other Lisps (Clojure, Arc, 
Dylan, more researchy), which might be interesting in what they chose to 
change (not just added features), and why.

Separate from PL histories, and various models of computation, I think 
we start to get into human issues like linguistics and aesthetics, and I 
don't think that's well-understood in PL, nor does it seem to be the 
same for everyone.  (For example, simply from looking at how people use 
Racket syntax, put roughly, it looks like some people seem to use visual 
while others seem purely verbal or mathematical; what happens when 
someone from one of those categories tries to design an intuitive or 
convenient language for everyone, but everyone isn't processing the 
language the same way?)

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