How To Be a Rockstar Developer

One evening in 2018, Dylan Beattie sat down in a bar, opened a laptop, and wrote a joke: a parody specification for Rockstar, a programming language based on the lyrics to 1980s power ballads. The joke was supposed to end there: a single Markdown file that folks would read, maybe laugh a bit, and then get on with their lives… well, that’s not quite how it worked out.

The internet’s a big place, and a little corner of it took Rockstar to their hearts: they found it, they loved it - and then they implemented it. Six years on, Rockstar has shown up in the most unlikely places, from Classic Rock magazine, to Advent of Code, to Carnegie Mellon University and MIT - and each time, it attracts a new wave of aspiring Rockstar developers, with questions about how it works, and suggestions about how to make it better. And so, one evening in 2024, Dylan sat down in another bar, opened another laptop, and wrote another joke: “Rockstar 2.0: The Difficult Second Album”.

On one level, Rockstar in 2024 is a stupid joke language based on Bon Jovi songs. On another level, it’s packed with things that would have been impossible even just a few years ago: a project that combines .NET, C#, JavaScript, browser APIs, and web assembly, building on decades of research in parser engineering and asynchronous application development. And yes, it’s still based on Bon Jovi songs.

This is the story of Rockstar 2.0. You’ll learn about the history of esoteric programming languages, from INTERCAL, to Piet, to the researcher who taught Perl to speak Latin. You’ll learn what’s involved in creating an entirely new programming language. You’ll see a lot of cool tech, you’ll marvel at just how much engineering can go into one joke, and who knows - you might even qualify as a Certified Rockstar 2.0 Developer.

Other talks by Dylan Beattie