<story><title>It&apos;s Time for a New Old Language – Guy Steele [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCuZkaaou0Q</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cryptonector</author><text>Wow, this is a very nice talk.  I particularly liked the Q&amp;amp;A, where Guy Steele went back and explained the type checker shown earlier.  And I also loved the LISP macro backtick-comma inspiration for using underline to &amp;quot;escape&amp;quot; overline.  Brilliant!</text></comment>
<story><title>It&apos;s Time for a New Old Language – Guy Steele [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCuZkaaou0Q</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve finished watching the talk, and I&amp;#x27;m not sure if this is serious, or is Guy Steele just trolling people in a sophisticated way. The TL;DR as I understand is:&lt;p&gt;- Computer science papers have this ad-hoc, ever evolving notation that started out in mathematics, that is not well defined (every paper ends up using a different flavour, sometimes even a bunch of mutually contradicting flavours at the same time), and that is subject to weird evolutionary pressures (like page limit of CS papers leading to extreme conciseness).&lt;p&gt;- Particularly interesting is the evolution of overline notation, and the ubiquitous but never defined use of ellipsis.&lt;p&gt;- Guy thinks this is a mess and should be cleaned up. His first contribution is solving overline notation abuse by introducing &lt;i&gt;underlines&lt;/i&gt;, which cancel out overlines, thus implementing quasiquoting in mathematical notation. His second contribution is formalizing the meaning of ellipsis by defining a transformation from ellipsis form into over&amp;#x2F;underline form.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it&amp;#x27;s because of the way he presented it, or maybe because of my unfamiliarity with the space, but overall this talk really felt like a one-hour long practical joke aimed at CS academics.</text></comment>