Steve Yegge on Dynamic Programing Languages

By Xah Lee. Date:

Steve Yegge, a popular programer who worked at amazon and now at Google, most popularly known by his blogs. He is a programing language aficionado, and a heavy emacs and lisp advocate, and a java basher (yay!).

he gave a talk on dynamic languages at Stanford:

Dynamic Languages Strike Back (lecture by Steve Yegge)

transcript at:

the vid is 1 hour.

i watched this when it came out, but just watched the whole yesterday again.

I like Steve Yegge. I admire his abilities, and i like his style. (among the many celebrity programers, only a handful i can say i like. Vast majority i despise and think are charlatans (includes: Larry Wall, Rob Pike, Eric Raymond, Tom Christiansen, Bjarne Stroustrup. (Disclaimer: opinion only.)).)

Steve Yegge, has also written perhaps one of the top 5 most non-trivial emacs package, the js2 mode (among others), which includes a JavaScript parser and check your syntax on-the-fly. Unfortunately, it was shot down and brushed aside in emacs dev mailing list politics (my view). Instead, in emacs 23, the js mode we got is a simple brainless one.