Lambda the Ultimate

(via Slashdot). The initial developer release of Croquet, the Smalltalk-based distributed computing environment, is now available.

It's different enought that I don't really know what to make of it - is this the future? Or a testbed for ideas that will find more durable expression in another context?

In a discussion on mini-languages over on PerlMonks, one poster brought out a series of languages that I wouldn't consider "mini", though they do tend to be used as embedded languages inside a larger language. This poster wanted to include Turing Completeness as a requirement, stateing that if you don't, you may end up including pretty much any non-trivial OO API.

I realized from this that I don't have a good definition of "Domain Specific Language". I'm certain TC shouldn't be a requirement, but I also don't want a definition that's too broad. In the past, I went mostly by intuition; Regular Expressions in Perl "Just Feels" like a mini-language to me, but obviously this lacks rigor.

Is there an accepted definition of DSL or mini-language?

Three part series on R that's of interest for domain specific PL development. First parts can be found at Part 1: Dabbling with a wealth of statistical facilities and
Part 2: Functional programming and data exploration. (Part three is still in the works). R is a suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display, which is quite useful for statistical analysis. It builds upon the S language developed originally at Bell Labs.

A three-part series, ...introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages... The (GPL'd) R programming language has two parents, the proprietary S/S-PLUS programming language, from which it gets most of its syntax, and the Scheme programming language, from which it gets many (more subtle) semantic aspects.