Lambda the Ultimate

I guess the record wouldn't be complete without mentioning this proposal,

This PEP proposes an extension to "duck typing" called "monkey typing", that preserves most of the benefits of duck typing, while adding new features to enhance inter-library and inter-framework compatibility. The name comes from the saying, "Monkey see, monkey do", because monkey typing works by stating how one object type may mimic specific behaviors of another object type.

More here and here (from Guido).

Oleg's presentation at the workshop in honor of Daniel Friedman is great fun as usual. The topic of repeated applications of call/cc has been mentioned on LtU previously, a few years ago. New this time: the full and correct beta-normalizer written as a direct-style syntax-rule. The normalizer implements calculus of explicit substitutions. The talk presents probably the shortest (and the fastest) normal-order beta-normalizer as a (stand-alone) Scheme macro. Another new feature is the discussion of self-applications of delimited continuation operators. The talk mentions incidentally that shift, control, shift0 and other, less-delimited control operators are the members of the same family: gshift/greset.

Hot stuff.

Getting sick of Python posts by now? Sorry...

A large part of this presentation consists of a series of code examples showing how something is done in pure Java versus a Jython version. A nice illustration of the differences between the languages (did anyone say explicit static typing?) and about their different abstraction facilities and domain specific abstractions (e.g., builtin dictionaries and list comprehensions).

Analyzing these examples may be fun exercise idea for those of us teaching PL courses.