Lambda the Ultimate

I am extremely pleased to have Erik guest blog here. I've been after him for a couple of years now to come join us.

Erik's many interests and contributions are chronicled on his home page, but I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone of the paper Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes, and Barbed Wire by Erik, Maarten Fokkinga, and Ross Paterson (FPCA'91). This foundational paper is one of our favorites, and I urge those interested in grasping what functional programming is all about to go and read it. Hopefully, a more accessible version, titled Bananas in VB, is forthcoming...

We invite Guest Bloggers so that the LtU community can engage them in discussion about their work and opinions. I am sure the discussion with Erik can be enlightening for us all.

In a first phase, we demonstrate how far we can get with object-oriented functional programming, if we restrict ourselves to plain Haskell~98. In the second and major phase, we systematically substantiate that Haskell~98, with some common extensions, supports all the conventional OO features plus more advanced ones, including first-class lexically scoped classes, implicitly polymorphic classes, flexible multiple inheritance, safe downcasts and safe co-variant arguments. Haskell indeed can support width and depth, structural and nominal subtyping. We address the particular challenge to preserve Haskell's type inference even for objects and object-operating functions. Advanced type inference is a strength of Haskell that is worth preserving. Many of the features we get "for free": the type system of Haskell turns out to be a great help and a guide rather than a hindrance.

You can download the paper and OOHaskell from here.

The call for papers for FLOPS 2006 is now out.

FLOPS benefits from an eclectic mix of FP and LP papers,
one of the few venues where the two communities get
together. It should be a congenial meeting, situated under
Mt Fuji.

We have two excellent invited speakers.
Peter van Roy, on Mozart
Guy Steele, on Fortress (just confirmed)

Submission deadline is 11 November 2005,
the conference is 24--28 April 2006.
Do submit, do come!