Samantha John, Jason Brennan
Designing a better Programmer Community
Synopsis
We will show how new approaches to language design create a better programming community.
Traditionally, programming communities have been dominated by a certain type. Programmers tend to be analytical thinkers who don’t mind banging their heads against errors all day long. New, more inclusive languages make programming attractive to a wider audience who wouldn’t normally have considered it (and don’t particularly enjoy error messages).
In this talk we will share our learnings from designing a programming language for kids. We’ll talk about the tradeoffs between simplicity and power and how we found the optimal balance for our audience. We hope others can learn from our design principles to create more languages and platforms to bring the joy of programming to everybody.
Biography
