Beyond Parsing: who should we interview next?

Me and Sergej recently started this podcast on Language Engineering called Beyond Parsing.

So far we interviewed:

Who do you think we should interview next?

Andrew Kelly: creator of Zig programming language

Thank you for the suggestion, I did not know about Zig!
Can I ask you why are you interested in it?

I think that in the podcast we are trying to be a bit less technical than with other medium. We are focusing more on the implications of technology. For example, we could talk about the difficulties of adopting a new language in an organization, but focus less on how a language is implemented.

Let’s hear what @sergej thinks about that

Zig is made because of the lack of maintainability of C++. ZIg is made to be a more robust, frictionless language compared to C++. I think it’d be interesting for him to come on to the podcast and talk about what led him to sit down and design the language. It’s starting to catch fire. With the new C-to-Zig tools, ASM tools, and nice features for writing robust and maintainable code.

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I’d say Zig is out of focus for Beyond Parsing.

In Beyond Parsing we want to focus on domain-specific languages and talk about challenges and benefits of using a DSL in a business. Basically to let technical managers know that language engineering is not theoretical research of interest only to compiler/computer science/linguist geeks, but that you can actually fairly easily build a language specifically for your business analysts/domain experts who can then use it to make fewer mistakes and achieve faster turnaround.

Interviewing people who are building better general purpose languages could be interesting as well but should be a separate podcast, otherwise we’d confuse our listeners.

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How about somebody from the Racket community? For example, Matthew Flatt.

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I had a Racket phase some time ago.
Here it seems there are a few examples of DSLs built with racket: https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/domain-specific-languages.html

I think it could be interesting. We could discuss with them about the differences with using a Language Workbench and the different balance between tool support and cost.

One could even discuss using something like Racket for domain modelling and DSL prototyping and then move to LWs.

Or perhaps Racket DSLs have a different audience w.r.t. DSLs built with Language Workbenches, and we could dive into this.