Lambda the Ultimate

This looks cool.

I am not sure about the details of how these bricks are to be programmed, but from the Slashdot dicussion is seems that there is some kind of dataflow language. Even more interesting is the claim that the VM is going to be documented, so third party language developers can target this low end robotics platform.

I will not quote this introduction/manifesto/historical overview, as every page of it is worth reading.

It is not only a nice introduction into a promising field, but also a demonstration of how language design issues can be (to some extent) separated from high-level fundamental intuitions.

It is also quite interesting to follow the historical lines of the paper, it reads like an epic!

Ah, and by the way, that's the same constraint programming that underlies Oz.

In this post, Andreas Rossberg alludes to the idea of an "effect system," which annotates programs with information about what impure operations various components perform. He also says that there has been "quite some research on [effect systems] in the past 15 years." However, I've been unable to find anything interesting with Google. Could someone please point me to some good research on effect systems?