Lambda the Ultimate

The Journal of Statistical Software http://www.jstatsoft.org/ has a Special Volume devoted to the topic: "Lisp-Stat, Past, Present and Future".

In the world of statistics, it appears that XLISP-STAT http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/xls/xlsinfo/xlsinfo.html has lost out to the S family of languages: S / R / S-plus:

• S-plus is commercial, http://www.insightful.com/products/splus/default.asp
• R is Gnu open-source http://www.r-project.org/

In fact, the S languages are not statistical per se; instead they provide an environment within which many classical and modern statistical techniques have been implemented.

An article giving an excellent overview of the special volume is: "The Health of Lisp-Stat" http://www.jstatsoft.org/v13/i10/v13i10.pdf

Some of the articles describe the declining user base of the language due to defections:

• "On Abandoning XLISP-STAT" - http://www.jstatsoft.org/v13/i07/v13i07.pdf
• "Lisp-Stat to Java to R" - http://www.jstatsoft.org/v13/i04/v13i04.pdf

whilst other articles describe active projects using XLisp-Stat, often leveraging the power of the language, in particular for producing dynamic graphics.

The S family of languages, originally developed at Bell Labs, has much to recommend it. S is an expression language with functional and class features. However, as the original creator and main developer of XLisp-Stat, (and now R developer) Luke Tierney explains in "Some Notes on the Past and Future of Lisp-Stat" http://www.jstatsoft.org/v13/i09/v13i09.pdf ,

"While R and Lisp are internally very similar, in places where they differ the design choices of Lisp are in many cases superior."

Languages and environments have always been fellow travelers. At some point they'll begin to part ways. Domain-specific languages will continue to flourish; they're the future of programming. But they'll target fewer environments.

It's easier to learn languages than to learn environments. So while these things have tended to proliferate in pairs -- each language carrying around its own environment, like a turtle with its shell -- my argument is that over time the environments will tend to consolidate.

Jon offers a couple of entertaining examples, but the fundamental point is worth thinking about.

Until quite recently the general view was the exact opposite of what Jon is arguing: languages, it was argued, are going to be consolidated. Remember Java as the cure all solution to software?

The proliferation of programming languages, domain specific and otherwise, isn't news for LtU readers. It is a good sign to see it mentioned on Infoworld.

Does anybody know why the site is down?

Also, where can I find active lists/forums on Erlang?

Thanks,
Enrico

A lot of language theory goes past here on Lambda the Ultimate, but we rarely see that theory directly impacting commercial programmers.

I'm a great fan of theoretical concepts like arrows, but at the same time I'm a self-employed programmer interested in solving my clients' problems.

Pugs is notable in that it profitably uses recent developments such as GADTs and Template Haskell for an implementation of Perl6.

I recently became a regular on the #perl6 irc channel and soon after joined the list of committers.

In just a few days I've seen a lot. I've seen enthusiastic members of the Perl community learning Haskell. I've seen myself learning Perl. I've also seen how daily Perl programmers work with abstractions like monad transformers. I've seen how some structures are easy to extend for programmers new to both the Pugs codebase and Haskell.

The Pugs project was started 64 days ago by Autrijus Tang, as an exercise while reading TaPL. Pugs already includes network and threading primitives. New tests and code are add at an amazing rate, as evidenced by the smoke tests.

I don't know if I'll end up using Perl after Pugs is written, but I am learning how to practice the theory of programming language design and implementation.