Lambda the Ultimate

Hans Nowak has a post about Poplog. I've never heard of it and I don't really get what it is, but I figured some here might be interested so I thought I'd mention it.

Nothing really new for the LtU audience in this interview with the Pragmatic Programmers, but it is interesting to read their views on programming language. This quote is nice, even if you aren't a Lisp fan:

Ultimately, it comes down to ease of expression. If I can express myself in code at a level closer to the problem domain, then I'm going to be more effective, and my code is likely to be easier to maintain and extend. Paul Graham makes a big deal out of the way Lisp helped him while building the software that became Yahoo Stores, and he's right. These languages, applied properly, are a strategic advantage. I know some companies are using them with great success. And you know -- they're keeping quiet about it.

They also have an interesting take on the publishing industry, which certainly in academic circles is having a harder time justifying its existence.

My position is that the creation of domain specific languages that do not seamlessly support the ability to transform information along the refinement scale are not helpful to us. So, for example, a component designer that is a stand alone tool unconnected to the class designer that provides the next logical level of refinement (classes being used to construct components) is a pot hole in the road from concept to actual implementation. Now, this is not as I have said to indicate that domain specific languages are bad, just that many of us in this industry love to create new languages be they graphical, textual or conceptual. We have to beware of the tendency to build these disjoint languages that force the user to keep stopping and jumping across another gap.

I am not sure I want to go back to the argument between IBM and Microsoft about this stuff, but I think the notion of refinement is important from a linguistic point of view (e.g., embedding, language evolution, type systems, reasoning etc.)

But can refinement of the sort discussed here work in practice, or does it depend on language-design savvy architects? Maybe the difference between IBM and Microsoft is that the IBM approach assumes all modelling knowledge will come pre-packaged, being designed by modelling professionals and embedded in tools, where as the Microsoft approach assumes more design expertise from users?

Feel free to correct me, I am really unsure where all this is heading anyway...