Lambda the Ultimate

PiDuce is a concurrent, distributed language intended for experimenting emerging Web Services technologies. PiDuce can be used as a target language for compilers and processors of business languages such as BizTalk and BPel...

PiDuce builds on solid theoretical foundations: it integrates the communication primitives of the Pi calculus, the synchronization patterns of the Join calculus, and an expressive type system that extends XML datatypes with first-class channels and that retains a notion of subtyping. PiDuce is
a type-safe language: well-typed process cannot fail.

PiDuce is implemented in C#. Source code and binaries are available for download.

Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python. -Matz.

Has anybody, then, made systems which might some day convert any language into any other language in a clean fashion, so that I can write in Alice ML and you can modify it in Java? Personally, I think it is obvious that even if such transmogrification were avaialble, it wouldn't always help a heck of a lot because the density of any given region of code can change like 100x. Not to mention that I guess any Turing-esque equivalency doesn't take into consideration the differences in runtime.

Another take on this: Why aren't there programming language generators / wizards which ask me a series of 20 questions ("do you prefer static or dynamic typing?" - i'd like to be able to answer 'both', of course) and then spit out a framework language (including debugger!) for me? (And under the covers everything gets converted to/from XML so we can individually put the curly braces - if any - wherever we prefer.)

The topic "Choice of OS of LtU readers" asked the wrong question and hence got a sequence of boring I use Linux or I use Windows answers. So let's ask the Right Question.

What new OS shows most promise of ...
a) Doing "The Right Thing" (in the Programming Language Designers overwhelmingly over developed Sense of Right),
b) Being usable in the near term,
and, as such, merits our attention, support and dual boot disk space?

A quick bit of Googling and weeding of the results turns up...

• Brix - Everything must be compiled to a "safe" meta language called Tetra

• Inferno (A Plan 9 derivative with "safe" language Limbo.)
• Plan 9 - Everythings a file, and a file is just a stream of bytes, and who cares where network wise where any thing really is.
• Unununium

Any other suggestions / commentary on these OS's most welcome.