The target audience for programming-language design (and standardization) are its users - the developers (hopefully many) who will use the resulting language. From afar, the relationship between designers and developers is not much different from that between the implementors of a software system and its users. Yet, the processes and principles used for translating the users’ needs into concrete design are often vastly different. In particular, while software design knows many socio-technical techniques for collecting requirements, language design might involve mathematical techniques unknown to the developers, and with no obvious a-priori relationship with reality. (The lambda calculus being the most obvious example.) This can be unsettling for both groups: Developers might wonder what mathematics has to say about their work, while language designers might feel that “real-world” requirements stand in the way of elegance and consistency. The talk provides design and standardization examples from both approaches and examines their tradeoffs for designers, standardizers, developers and software architects - and their implications for software design at large.

Mike Sperber is CEO of Active Group, a software consultancy in Tübingen, Germany that develops software for client projects using functional programming. He has a long history of publishing on functional programming, including many research papers, and was the project editor for the R6RS standard for the Scheme programming language. He has also developed an introductory course in programming in use at several German universities, based on the PLT group’s Program by Design approach. He also co-authored (with Nicole Rauch and Lars Hupel) the curriculum on Functional Software Architecture for iSAQB.