Lambda the Ultimate

Or are they just being lazy? ;-)

A gentle reminder to y'all to post something...

This article points out how open source scripting languages are in vogue in the corporate world:

Scripting languages have been used to build millions of applications on the Web, but in general have not been adopted widely by corporate developers. But more and more businesses and IT professionals are looking to these languages as a way to simplify and speed the creation of custom in-house programs, thus avoiding the now all-too-common logjam of late or overbudget applications.

Personally, I think the rise of these scripting languages as well as languages like Java demonstrates that the use of new programming languages is more fluid than most are willing to admit. Of course, it also demonstrates that building new scripting languages is becoming easier and easier.

(via PLNews)

This article might be of interest.

From a language design perspective, this was interesting (emphasis mine):

Most noticeably for anyone reading code in the new syntax, the common double-underscore keywords prevalent in Managed Extensions for defining garbage-collected classes, properties, and so on, are a thing of the past. While a few of these keywords remain and a few more are being introduced, they are infrequently used and won't muddy up the readability of the code. These double-underscore keywords are being replaced with two new types of keywords: context-sensitive and spaced. Context-sensitive keywords are only keywords when used in certain contexts, and spaced keywords are only keywords when used in combination with other keywords. For example, the __property keyword from Managed Extensions is replaced with the property keyword. (Not only that, but the entire syntax for defining a property and its accessors has been dramatically refined, making the declaration look very similar to what you might write in C#. See Figure 1 for an example.) This doesn't prevent you from using "property" as the name of a variable in your code. A token parsed as "property" is only treated as a keyword when in the context of declaring a property on a type.

Curious if many other languages do that with keywords, and if it ends up being a cure worse than the disease...

Slow day, so from yet another odd corner of cyberspace: the Cyc system which, well, ahum, from the site:

The Cyc Knowledge Server is a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine developed by Cycorp. Cycorp's goal is to break the "software brittleness bottleneck" once and for all by constructing a foundation of basic "common sense" knowledge--a semantic substratum of terms, rules, and relations--that will enable a variety of knowledge-intensive products and services. Cyc is intended to provide a "deep" layer of understanding that can be used by other programs to make them more flexible.

The system also comes with a language named

CycL which is "essentially an augmentation of first-order predicate calculus (FOPC), with extensions to handle equality, default reasoning, skolemization, and some second-order features."

No idea really what to think about it, CycL seems to have Lisp roots, predecessor of the semantic web or Peircian semeiotics based Wikipedia?