[Edinburgh-pm] A civil evening of beer and chat.

[Miles Gould]

I'm planning to be there too, but Ciorstaidh can't make it this time.

Also, one of the Algol-60 designers is giving a talk at the Forum on
Thursday morning about his new language:

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Thursday 28th April
10:30am-12:00pm
Informatics Forum Room G.03

"Grace: a New educational O-O programming language"

Speaker: Professor Andrew P Black

Abstract:

We are engaged in the design of a new Object-oriented educational
programming language called Grace.
Our motivation is frustration with available languages, none of which
seems to be suited to our target audience: students in the first two
programming courses.

What principles should we apply to help us design such a language?  We
started with a list of 17 "obviously good principles", aware that some
of them would conflict with each other.  What we didn't expect was that
some of them would conflict with good learning.

One of our principles was that the language should provide one "fairly
clear way" to do most things.  But suppose that an instructor wants to
use Grace to compare two ways of doing something?  How can one show
students the superiority of one approach over another if the alternative
approach cannot be expressed?  And yet we can hardly
fill our language with every miss-begotten language feature of the last
50 years, just so that we can explain to our students why it is better
not to program that way!

Prof Black will outline the principle features of Grace, list the open
issues, and listen to your reactions while all of the choices are still
on the table.  For more information, see http://www.gracelang.org

Biography

Andrew Black is a Professor of Computer Science at Portland State
University in Portland, Oregon.  His first programming language was
Algol 60, to which he attributes
a life-long interest in language design.  He is one of the designers of
Emerald, the first object-oriented language with specific support for
mobility, but admits to not really understanding object-orientation
until he had to teach it, 12 years later, for which purpose he learned
Smalltalk.

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Sounds like it could well be poorly-conceived vapourware, but I'm
intrigued to hear what he has to say.

Miles