Death of Computer Languages, the Birth of Intentional Programming (1995) [pdf]

3 kristianp 2 6/21/2025, 11:55:03 AM viega.org ↗

Comments (2)

Jtsummers · 3h ago
I knew the name was familiar, this work led to Intentional Software (the company) which made a language workbench and kept promising interesting things about 20 years ago and nothing seemed to come of it. JetBrains put out MPS which is based on the same idea.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html

zabzonk · 7h ago
> The purpose of a language is to encode the programmers’ contributions

Where did this "contribution" stuff come from? Does anyone know here it originated (is this the origin)? It even seems that now what we used to be known as programmers are simply "contributors", which I hate.

And for me, the purpose of a computer language is to tell the machine what I want it to do, possibly somewhat indirectly.