Commentary on the Designer of a LanguageI had an interesting conversation with Graham last week about design. He's spent four years in a design program at York/Sheridan, and he's in the midst of figuring out what to do with that degree. One point that I made is that design is in everything around us -- there is almost no job on earth that doesn't involve aspects of design. It's too bad that there weren't designers looking over our shoulders as us non-designers do our jobs. There would be lots of times when they'd be able to point us in a better direction. Next my mind turned to the task of designing a programming language. It would be interesting to line up the people who have designed the world's major programming languages: C, C++, Java, Perl, etc. Who were they? How did they think? Were they mathematical? Engineers? Artistic? Linguistic? Were they designers? (In a practical sense, yes, but in a professional sense probably not)I feel like a programming language, while very mathimatical, logical, engineering-minded, obviously linguistic, is also an interesting application for design. Professional designers are friends of simplicity, intuitiveness, asthetics, conciceness, beauty... those are all things I'd want in a programming language. From this standpoint, it's interesting to consider that the web is pulling computer people towards design and designers towards computers, since web page layout is such an important aspect of the web. I wonder whether these more design-conscious computer people will help to bring forth some really intuitive, asthetically pleasing, beautiful, computer languages. |