Ousterhout's Dichotomy Isn't

Abstract

Ousterhout's Dichotomy attempts to split the language world into system and scripting languages. This split isn't simple, and doesn't work. But understanding where it fails is a great way to approach the concept of power in programming languages. In this talk we will cover

• what it means to be powerful
• how Clojure's design gives you power
• the relation between power and stratification
• why numerics changed in 1.3
• a post-Ousterhout classification scheme that is more useful
• some predictions for Clojure's future.

On the Web

• Video from Clojure/conj, Nov 2011