Lambda the Ultimate

The proceedings of the International Lisp Conference 2002 are now freely available for download here. A selection of video-recorded talks are also downloadable (currently the Robocup ones). ILC2002 was previously covered on LtU in a great report from Oleg.
Enjoy!

I know I have made mention of this before, and I would like to thank many for making comments, espicially Dan Shappir. But I would like to throw an idea out to those of you, the many, that are smarter at this than I am. =)

The paper I have read concerning JavaScript 2.0 doesn't hold a lot of water with me; not necessarily because of the technical modifications being made, but because the future ECMA standard is leaning towards what is 'en-vogue' instead of sticking to what makes JS distinct. I do feel that JavaScript needs some changes, and I would like to ask the opinions of everyone as to what changes they see that need to happen, as well as listen to one of my own.

One change I would like to see JavaScript is the addition of being able to declare identifier's to be of a certain object type. I was always a fan of dynamic typing merely because I have always been bad at planning my code, so I always felt that static typing got in my way, and caused many edits in my code. I of course blamed this on the language, instead of what the real problem was... namely me, and my poor skills.

Although I see the benefits of typing, mainly for type checking. I do not think it is a panacea, and also think that JS's 'var' keyword provides a suitable syntax for declaring dynamic identifiers. Not to mention, 'var' can be implicit when an identifier is not declared, but instead immediately assigned.

This is just a thought I had run through my head, and over-all I think that it is a good idea. I would like to hear other's opinions concerning the problems with JS as well as my suggestion for a change in the semantics of JS.

Best Regards,

Mark

From 20 years of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation: 1979 - 1999. A Selection.

A one page retrospective of this highly important paper. Useful as a guide to the literature and related research.

In my talk, I will compare and contrast the two ideas of programming and programming language design. I will present and defend the thesis that good object-oriented programming heavily "borrows" from functional programming and that the future of object-oriented programming is to study functional programming and language design even more.

Not all that much that is new for LtU readers, but a nice overview none the less. Includes some details about the PLT Scheme approach to modules and objects.

My name is Paul McJones. I hope to use this weblog to discuss software history among other topics. For several months I’ve been studying the early history of Fortran, and trying to track down the source code for the original Fortran compiler. Although I just set up this weblog recently (June-July 2004), I’ve created back-dated entries to document my quest in chronological order

It seems most items recently are about programming language history... This site describes an interesting quest, which makes me wonder if the evolution of more recent languages will be easier to document, given the Internet and so forth. It would be rather amusing if LtU will once be used as an historical resource ;-)

The idea of preserving classic software is a good one. I think programming languages (and programming technology in general) are very good indecators of the state of the art and the major issues of the day (e.g., Java and the Net), so building a timelime by considering PLs sounds like a good idea.

We should also keep in mind that John Backus of FP fame was famous even before that for his work on compilers, and was involved with the Fortran team at IBM.