Lambda the Ultimate

More from Slashdot, which today points to an article on Rel, Dave Voorhis' open source implementation of Tutorial D (see Chris Date and Hugh Darwen's The Third Manifesto for a discussion of the rationale behind this language).

Voorhis explains his motives for creating the implementation in an article on the (currently somewhat sparse) Rel Wiki.

Discussions of possible replacements of, or improvements on, SQL usually end up being all about the powerful institutional/human factors (or "network effects") that will impede acceptance of any new solution. Refreshingly, Voorhis is going ahead and building one anyway, without waiting for approval from the masses. It might catch on, or it might not; at least someone's giving it a go.

Just found this project in a post to comp.lang.lisp : Erlisp

(...)languages like Erlang have intriguing approaches to concurrency that are easier to use and less "low-level" than this industry best practice.
Erlisp is my attempt to bring some of these ideas to Common Lisp, and perhaps develop some new approaches in the process.

It's still vaporware, but sounds definately interesting. Maybe some of our resident Erlang & Lisp gurus (Luke? ;-) could share some ideas about it.

According to the buzz on this forum thread, Java 5.0 (nee 1.5.0) ships with a tool called "apt" (Annotation Processing Tool) that enhances the traditional javac compiler with the ability to let the user write code that examines and transforms the AST.

I assume this tool will not let you extend the Java language in arbitrary ways: it seems like apt can only parse source code that is legal Java. However, it will let you create compile-time checks for some rules that previously could only be checked at runtime. It will also likely be useful for code generation; some heavily used Java projects rely on bytecode manipulation (JDO, JBoss, Tapestry) and I suspect they could simplify their lives a lot with this.