Lambda the Ultimate

Probably goes against Dijkstra's advice of modeling real world objects, but Luca Cardelli is exploring Programming Languages for Biology.

If you want to go to another country, it would behoove you to learn the language of the land. Luca Cardelli, an Italian researcher working in England, knows this lesson well. He wants to help scientists travel to an unknown country — the membranes and cells of our bodies — and feel right at home. To do this, he is developing a computer language to model the processes of biology.

The text for Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice is now available online. The text documents the development history of the Smalltalk 80 language.

• Part One of this book is a collection of papers that provide some
  background and history of the Smalltalk-80 implementation.
• In Part Two we present papers that describe the experiences four
  implementors had in bringing their systems to life.
• Part Three is a collection of measurements made by the
  implementation groups.
• In Part Four we present papers that look toward the future of
  Smalltalk systems and propose ideas for extending the Smalltalk-80
  system beyond its initial form.

via Cincom Smalltalk Blogs.

Mind as well complete the daily trifecta and post the article on Programming Language Popularity. The author combines search, advertizing and job data to try and draw a measurement on various aspects of popularity. Open to criticism, but the results are somewhat non-surprising given the weights applied, and coming up with a truly objective measurement is probably impossible.

In conclusion, if we look at the data available to us, especially as presented in the final, normalized chart below, we can see that there are broad patterns in language usage. Beyond the overall ranking, it is also possible to see whether a language is more used (jobs) or promoted (ads), and also whether it is used for open source projects, where presumably the participants have chosen a language because they feel it is truly the best choice, rather than dictated by management or commercial needs.