Jérôme Martin

Racket allows us to create languages on the fly. It's extremely practical for making DSLs (domain specific languages), but can it also be used to make art? That's what we'll see in this talk, making (executable) poetry with Racket!

I've always been fascinated by languages, may it be programming languages, "natural" , or constructed ones. The way streams of words convey meaning, information, requests, but also emotions, thoughts, feelings, stories, mood... Humans have been using languages for thousands of years. It's one of our most important creation and the one we use the most. For a long time, we only had two sorts of language: natural and constructed. But since the invention of computing, and the concept of "software", we now have third sort: programming languages. We've been writing programming languages for a century now, but, can we consider programming languages to be languages human could also talk with? Can we consider making art with them? Poetry? Let's try out using the wonderful language forge that is Racket, and see if we can learn something on the way, and have fun!

You always wished you could have a language that explains perfectly what you are trying to do? You find yourself constantly waiting for your favorite programming language to add a feature? Why not doing it yourself? Come at this workshop and try making your own language using Racket, the language-oriented programming language! (did I say "language" twice?)

This workshop will quickly describe how to use the Racket language, then dive into making your own language. I should be able to handle between 3 to 5 people at a time. Session duration should range from 1 hour to 1.5 hours.

The history of programmers trying to use programming languages for data files, configuration, or UI description files, is filled with horror stories. "WHY in the world did we choose Lua for our data files again?" was an interrogation I had not so far in the past, when I was working for a big game company. "HOW did we let this Grunt file grow more than 8000 js lines?" was a more recent one. Programming languages are NOT a good fit for data files. But there may be another way... Today, I want to talk about my favorite part of lisp languages: making your own languages when you need them. By that I don't mean making a big pile of utility functions or macros for the savvy lisper to drool upon, but actually taking the time to think about a file format, may it be completely static, and make it from scratch using s-expressions. Those parentheses may be good for something in the end...