Growing a Language (Guy Steele, OOPSLA 1998)
Guy Steele had a hand in Scheme, Common Lisp, the Java Language Specification and Fortress. In October 1998 he gave the OOPSLA keynote under an odd constraint: he could use any word of one syllable freely, but every longer word had to be defined first, out loud, from words he’d already defined. The constraint is the argument. Watching him build up “woman”, “number”, “machine”, “definition” and finally “pattern” from a small base vocabulary shows the audience what it’s like to grow a language from a small core....