Google TechTalks
May 10, 2006
Peter Seibel
ABSTRACT
In the late 1920's linguists Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Whorf hypothesized that the thoughts
we can think are largely determined by the
language we speak. In his essay "Beating the
Averages" Paul Graham echoed this notion and
invented a hypothetical language, Blub, to
explain why it is so hard for programmers to
appreciate programming language features that
aren't present in their own favorite
language. Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
hold for computer languages? Can you be a
great software architect if you only speak
Blub? Doesn't Turing equivalence imply that
language choice is just another
implementation detail? Yes, no, and no says
Peter... Tags :lispprogrammingpeterseibelcommon