Panel Discussion

Tony Hoare will open with a 10 minute summary of language features proposed during his career. Each feature was motivated by the desire to reduce the range of programming errors by increasing the range of errors discovered at compile-time and ensuring that those which slip through can be detected and isolated at run-time. Then he and Bruce Tate will introduce the panel and ask the language inventors to give a five minute introduction of their language answering questions like:

* Was ease of writing correct programs and debugging incorrect ones important to the market segment (ecological niche) at which your language was aimed?

* Which particular features of your language met this goal, or tried and failed?

* For what features was correctness sacrificed in the pursuit of alternative goals – eg. compactness, familiarity, compatibility, efficiency, etc?

* In the light of hindsight, what would you have done differently, and why or why not?

This will be followed by a discussion amongst inventors of languages such as F#, Erlang and Hack.