Lambda the Ultimate

An introductory article from IBM developerWorks on Cocoon, continuation-based (sometimes called "modal") web applications, and such.

If you've ever developed a non-trivial Web application, you know that development complexity is increased by the fact that Web browsers allow users to follow arbitrary navigation paths through the application. No matter where the user navigates, the onus is on you, the developer, to keep track of the possible interactions and ensure that your application works correctly. While the traditional MVC approach does allow you to handle these cases, there are other options available to help resolve application complexity. Developer and frequent developerWorks contributor Abhijit Belapurkar walks you through a continuations-based alternative that could simplify your Web application development efforts.

via comp.lang.scheme

Pascal-FC is a programming language aimed at supporting the teaching of concurrent programming. It supports a wide range of concurrency primitives including semaphores, monitors with condition variables, synchronous message passing using channels (as in occam and CSP), remote invocation (as used in the Ada rendezvous), protected resources (as used in Ada 95 protected objects) and requeue. All of these features can be easily used, either in isolation or together.

An important feature of the implementation of Pascal-FC is the random switching between user processes incorporated into the run-time system. This provides an excellent simulation of true parallelism and invariably finds bugs in poorly structured programs.

It seems like Pascal-FC wasn't mentioned here before, and since there are implementations for various platforms I thought some of you may want to download and play with it a bit.

On December 3rd and 4th, 2004, the Computer Science Department at Indiana University hosted a conference to celebrate Daniel P. Friedman's 60th birthday. The DanFest web page has the program, links to some of the papers, and photos.

Dan Friedman, of course, is a CS professor at Indiana and an influential programming language researcher and teacher, best known to a wider audience as the lead author of EOPL, used in many PL courses. Who do you get to speak at a conference in honor of the author of a book so famous it is recognizable by its acronym? Why, the authors of the other famous acronymized books in the same field, of course, such as SICP, HTDP, and TSPL.

The keynote address, "Dan Friedman: Cool Ideas", was delivered by Guy Steele, and the star-studded program included authors of the above books, and many previous students of Friedman's. An article in the Indiana student newspaper provides some of Friedman's perspective on the event.

The speaker list also included a couple of (semi-)regular LtU'ers, Oleg Kiselyov and Kevin Millikin (did I miss anyone?) My thanks to Oleg for prompting me to post this.