Lambda the Ultimate

It has been discussed recently somewhat in The new old..
and Revisiting AWK, but I am finding more and more treatments of Unix shell scripting (actually, not quite "shell scripting", but the combination of all of the Unix mini-languages) as a means to perform complex tasks usually reserved for real monolithic programming languages.

Here is an interesting (intro level) computational linguistics paper (original postscript) (verbatim pdf) about counting trigrams on a decent size corpus using just standard Unix utilities.

The work of Peyton Jones and Eber on specifying financial contracts with combinators (How to write a financial contract) has often cropped up here, but hasn't, I think, ever had its own story.

Since Yale has a vistor, Christian Stefenson, presenting a talk on Enterprise Resource Planning ( A Declarative Framework for Enterprise Systems), which based on the work of Peyton Jones & Eber, I thought it might be timely to raise this very interesting idea.

Some links

• DSL for financial contracts
• Paul Snively's comments about virtual world money'