Lambda the Ultimate

LtU is becoming boring. Editors are urged to post ineteresting stuff. I can't do it alone.

More specifically. it has beeen awhile since we had any new items in the OOP, LP, and meta-programming departments.

Sometimes new languages are used in the design of jewels, and authors may attribute a product's success to the use of a particular language or type of language. Here, I have grave doubts. I have lost count of the number of languages that have been introduced to me as the solution to the software problems that everyone experiences.

"Why Software Jewels Are Rare" pdf David Lorge Parnas

(Apparently a response to "A Plea for Lean Software" pdf Niklaus Wirth)

From Mike Davidson's blog: a web designer gets an education in floating-point arithmetic.

Something happened today which shook the very foundations of what I’ve always believed about computers. See, maybe this was just a crazy notion, but I was always under the impression that if there was ONE thing computers did well, it was math. Simple math, algebra, geometry, calculus… it didn’t matter. Computers have always been equation solving machines. Or so I thought. — Apple Flunks First Grade Math

Not really about programming languages, but I thought it was interesting to see a non-programmer's reaction to a basic programming issue. I say "non-programmer", and yet Davidson is apparently knowledgeable enough to write Flash code and Javascript DOM applications.

As programming skills become more and more necessary in non-programing fields, I expect we will see more and more people writing code with less and less understanding of what they are doing, and a piecemeal education will become (even more) the norm. How can/should we, as programming professionals and researchers, deal with that?

(via Gordon)

PLaneT is PLT Scheme's centralized package distribution system.

PLaneT provides automatic run-time module distribution and caching.

Cute, and be sure to check out the available packages on the PLaneT website, as well as the implemenetation details.

The SRFI 40 document (now in "final" status) includes a very nice discussion of streams, especially as regards implementing them in strict languages (i.e, "even" vs. "odd" streams).

The code is in Scheme, of course, this being an SRFI, but basic knowledge of Scheme should be enough in order to read the highly readable SRFI document. Do check it out if you are interested in streams.