Lambda the Ultimate

A Call to Arms - Jim Gray, ACM Queue

"The really big news here is that these languages have also been fully integrated into the current crop of object-relational databases. The runtimes have actually been added to the database engines themselves such that one can now write database stored procedures (modules), while at the same time defining database objects as classes within these languages."

Big-time language lock-in.

A type-indexed function is a function that is defined for each member of some family of types. Haskell's type class mechanism provides open type-indexed functions, in which the indexing family can be extended at any time by defining a new type class instance. The purpose of this paper is to present TypeCase: a design pattern that allows the definition of closed type-indexed functions. It is inspired by Cheney and Hinze's work on lightweight approaches to generic programming. We generalise their techniques as a design pattern. Furthermore, we show that type-indexed functions with type-indexed types, and consequently generic functions with generic types, can also be encoded in a lightweight manner, thereby overcoming one of the main limitations of the lightweight approaches.

A new paper in a field we follow quite closely (i.e., generic programming).

The paper starts with a useful summary of important previous results, which is worth reading even if you don't plan on studying the whole paper.

I just posted a new article for imperative-loving people about why recursive programming is better than imperative programming.

Here's the article: Mastering Recursive Programming

I thought you all might be interested, and I am interested in any comments, criticisms, additions, subtractions you all have.