Lambda the Ultimate

Since pi calculus is a hot topic lately, Pierce's Foundational Calculi for Programming Languages might be of interest as an introduction. It very briefly introduces and justifies foundational calculi in general, spends about 10 pages on lambda calculus, then builds on that with another 7 pages on pi calculus.

This quote:

overall flexibilty increases by having fewer components but greater composability.

made me think of HOFs.

A couple more teaser quotes:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.

...

It's better to be simple than to handle every possible case.

The domain is proof theory, the theme is "Eliminate Bureaucracy", the LtU angle is that if we can eliminate bureaucracy from proof theory, then we open the floodgates to applications of proof theory to computer science. That's the theory anyway...

Check out:

1. The workshop homepage;
2. The SD05 wiki page at Greg Restall's wiki;
3. Fancy going to Lisbon in July? slashdot journal thread...
4. LtU node #551 wherein Greg and I chatted about the workshop...

We've been talking about how good a lot of the stuff in computer science over the past 50 years or so has been. Here are links to some excellent free online archives that I've found out about.

• MIT AI Lab publications
• EWD archive
• CMU AI Repository (notable for its real and well-written Lisp source code)
• Stanford computer science technical reports and technical notes.
• www.its.os.org

Please let us know what good stuff you find in here, and if you know some other good free archives. There's a huge amount of good stuff tucked away waiting to be rediscovered on LtU.