I ran into a paper called "The Next 700 Languages" while doing Scala research. The paper, written in 1966, is lengthy but awesome. Its conclusion reminded me a lot of PGs paper, which I hadn't read:
The languages people use to communicate with computers differ in their intended aptitudes, towards either a particular application area, or a particular phase of computer use (high level programming, program assembly, job scheduling, etc). They also differ in physical appearance, and more important, in logical structure. The question arises, do the idiosyncracies reflect basic logical properties of the situations that are being catered for? Or are they accidents of history and personal background that may be obscuring fruitful developments? This question is clearly important if we are trying to predict or influence language evolution.
To answer it we must think in terms, not of languages, but of families of languages. That is to say we must systematize their design so that a new language is a point chosen from a well-mapped space, rather than a laboriously devised construction.
The languages people use to communicate with computers differ in their intended aptitudes, towards either a particular application area, or a particular phase of computer use (high level programming, program assembly, job scheduling, etc). They also differ in physical appearance, and more important, in logical structure. The question arises, do the idiosyncracies reflect basic logical properties of the situations that are being catered for? Or are they accidents of history and personal background that may be obscuring fruitful developments? This question is clearly important if we are trying to predict or influence language evolution.
To answer it we must think in terms, not of languages, but of families of languages. That is to say we must systematize their design so that a new language is a point chosen from a well-mapped space, rather than a laboriously devised construction.
PDF: http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~blume/classes/aut2008/proglang/pap...