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    Can we add a PLT tag? ☶ ask meta
    friendlysock avatar authored by friendlysock 1 year ago | 2 comments
Introduction

So, we don’t currently have a tag for programming language stuff.

I’d like to suggest the creation of a PLT tag to cover things that fall into one or more of:

  • programming language theory and design
  • academic musings on type systems
  • language implementation (when interpreted instead of compiled)
  • topics related to GCing, liveliness, etc.
  • general topics in language like parsing, lexing, grammars, and so on
Current tags (that don’t quite fit)

compilers is great when talking about compiled languages, but falls short when a language isn’t compiled.

programming feels too broad, and I could see articles about, say, graphics programming or embedded programming being lumped in with discussion of ML-family stuff.

math is a little too numerically oriented for discussions of things like Lambda calculus.

compscialso feels too broad, though it is closer to the academic nature of things.

Stories that would benefit

Basically, I think it would help for discovery in cases where an idea is about language design but we don’t want to hide it in the ghetto of a particular language–say, ignoring work on relevant to typing because it involved Rust or Typescript and user isn’t looking for things tagged javascript or rust.

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    lmm avatar lmm 1 year ago | link

    Sounds a bit too specific to me. compsci covers this subject just as well as plt would, and it’s not like we’re flooded with too many compsci stories and need to split up the tag.

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      evaryont avatar evaryont 1 year ago | link

      I can see the benefit, and agree that PLT could serve well. I myself am not interested in too much theory, so I don’t have a horse in the race, as it were. However, I was quite confused about what PLT actually meant until reading this post. Is there a possible alternative tag name that could be used? language-design perhaps? That wouldn’t limit it to technical posts, but I think linguistics related posts could find a welcome community here too. If not, so be it, but I would caution that prior until now, all the tags were self-evident by themselves without needing explanation text. (The text is also only exposed during submitting a post, so seeing it is non-trivial for guests.)