Lambda the Ultimate

Web programming is becoming more and more important, and many feel there's room for better programming language support for the style of programming is entails. One approach is, of course, to design dedicated (i.e., domain specific) programing languages, such as Links. The other approach is to build application frameworks, but this isn't as easy as it might sound, and depends on the underlying language features, for example continuations (continuations and web programming were discussed here many times).

Ajax style web applications may require multi-language programming, and pose their own set of software engineering difficulties. The Ruby on Rails framework (tutorial) supposedly handles Ajax very nicely, and is causing some developers to move in the direction of Ruby. Libraries and framework often have this effect, and influence language popularity more than fundamental language features. This is quite reasonable since, as we see repeatedly, it is quite difficult to appreciate a language by evaluating language features in isolation.

It might be helpful to consider what Ian had to say regarding Ruby on Rails as opposed to Python web frameworks.

I don't think the important issue at the moment is to decide which language is best. I think it is more important to identify the trends and establish if language design can help improve the state of the art, and if so where.

Personally, I think the answer is yes, and I mentioned some areas of opportunity before, but I'd be interested in hearing what others think.

Recently been looking at prototype-based languages eg. Self. While the concept sounds good, I've got this feeling that they are more memory intensive than class-based OOPLs. I haven't had the chance lately to check on this. Does anyone have experience or knowledge on this subject? Oh, and while I'm on this topic, how is the Prothon project getting on? I haven't been able to contact the site. Seems to be offline. Thanks.

Dynamic optimization refers to the runtime optimization of a native program binary. This paper describes the design and implementation of Dynamo, a prototype dynamic optimizer that is capable of optimizing a native program binary at runtime... Contrary to intuition, we demonstrate that it is possible to use a piece of software to improve the performance of a native, statically optimized program binary, while it is executing. Dynamo not only speeds up real application programs, its performance improvement is often quite significant. For example, the performance of many +O2 optimized SPECint95 binaries running under Dynamo is comparable to the performance of their +O4 optimized version running without Dynamo.

I think Dynamo is pretty well known, but in the light of the Apple switch to x86, it offers perspective on the possibility of using JIT compilation to translate binaries.

The application to programming languages is also straightforward.