Pre-West Prep: Jeanine Adkisson

April 03, 2015

Talk: Design and Prototype a Language in Clojure

Jeanine Adkisson's talk at Clojure/West is about designing and prototyping a language using Clojure.

Background

Lisps have been used for a long time to prototype other languages. Scheme was designed and used for just that purpose. The most popular books on compiler design often start with Lex and Yacc, which are just really old tools built when memory was so restricted you had to do your parsing in stages. Instaparse is way better for quickly exploring syntax. And since lambda calculus (which Clojure is based on) is computationally complete, you're in good hands exploring the entire range of computational semantics.

However, these are just generalities. Jeanine Adkisson will likely bring wit and depth to the talk, as she did in her Clojure/conj talk. She's a language designer, so she's got plenty of experience to draw from.

As an interesting background to language prototyping in Clojure, check out Bodil Stokke talking about her language Bodol.

About Jeanine Adkisson

Homepage - GitHub - Twitter

This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.

That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.

Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.