Lambda the Ultimate

There's a lot of marketing wrapped around their technical ideas, but this appears to be a model-driven architecture (MDA) tool with domain-specific language capabilities. Not sure what they mean by "lightweight language engineering" -- macros are too heavy? -- and I'm not sure I want to install their preview release.

MDAs and DSLs always seemed to be competing approaches, although you might have a specialized language for defining the models themselves. They both share the notion of defining the "problem" at a relatively high level and then magically creating the end solution, but I suppose that description is vague enough to apply to every tool since FORTRAN was first implemented.

Assembly code can be embedded in C code. Are there examples of a higher level programming language which could embed another high level programming language. HTML and javascipt does not count ;-)

On one particular problem instance (a garden of size 7x3), my C++ implementation finished in 1 second, while the OCaml implementation was still running after 16 minutes. Bear in mind that my OCaml implementation was dramatically faster than my equivalent Haskell code... If you write OCaml code that is isomorphic to C code, it will be fast---what about if you use OCaml the way it was meant to be used?

My critical view of this sort of thing is well known, and I don't want another holy war (the Knuth thread is enough for my taste), but I guess we should check comparisons of this sort from time to time, if only to keep everyone honest (including ourselves).