Lambda the Ultimate

Udell reports:

"When you think about it," Hugunin said, "why would the CLR be worse for dynamic languages than the JVM, given that Microsoft had the second mover advantage?" And in fact, while he had to do plenty of extra work to support dynamic features that the CLR doesn't natively offer, he notes that the massive engineering resources invested in the CLR make it highly optimized along a number of axes. So, for example, the CLR's function call overhead is apparently less than the native-code CPython's function call overhead, and this is one of the reasons why IronPython benchmarks well against CPython.

In case any language collector around here still has a copy of Vyper (the Python interpreter written in Ocaml by John Skaller that used to live at http://vyper.sourceforge.net/) flying around: Don't delete it, it may be the last existing copy, since neiter the author nor sourceforge still have one.

(So much for the permanence of electronic reccords in the internet age...)

I am very happy that I found GAP as it allowed me the opportunity to make a bad pun, I just had to try it when I read their description of how their web site had been organized.

I think the Grouping capabilities are pretty cool

This has got to be one of the sparsest language families. The classics are APL, APL2, A+, J, and K, which were developed in that order and have entangled histories. Nial is the dark horse. Glee is the newest. Nesl is a parallel array language. Then there's the programming language of Mathematica, which supports array operations.

Surely there are more?

This is a bit offtopic, but Francis Crick was an esteemed man of science and we should all be saddened to hear of his death.

Crick co-discovered the the structure and properties of DNA in 1953, along with James Watson.

His work leading to the understanding of the genetic code is, however, more closely related to our areas of interest. These classic experiments were an astonishing example of scientific discovery at its best.

In recent years Crick was interested in the questions of neurobiology, and published the provocative book Astonishing Hypothesis which tackled the question of human consciousness.

IronPython is a new Python port for the CLR. The recently released version 0.6 is the first public version.