Lambda the Ultimate

Eiffel Studio looks like a nice IDE. This might make an interesting case study of the effects of a good IDE on the popularity of a language.

The GPL'd effort has its own site:
http://eiffelsoftware.origo.ethz.ch/

It has debian packages in progress:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=361001

For completeness. The press release can be found here:
http://www.eiffel.com/general/news/2006/2006_04_05_pr.html

Python 2.5 seems to be feature complete now and is released as a first alpha. See here for a complete list of new features.

From a language perspective enhanced generators and the new with-statement are probably the most interesting features. For many developers the incorporation of the small relational database sqlite, the new XML package elementree and the foreign function interface ctypes might be the highlights.

A screencast about Microsoft's Atlas toolkit (Flash, Windows Media and QuickTime formats available).

Atlas it ASP.Net's AJAX solution, and it seems quite well thought out from what I can tell.

Both the ASP.Net Atlas code and the Atlas XML Script DSL provide a declarative programming model, which should help build AJAX applications which otherwise require a somewhat confusing programming model for beginners.

It sohuld be interesting to see how this approach compares with web frameworks such as Rails (whose DWIM approach makes it quite DSL-ish), and with the approach Wadler takes with Links.

“Stretch” Languages, or, 28 years of programming Oliver Steel

"Recently I reviewed the programming languages I’ve used over the 28 years of my programming career. The result it shown in the chart below..."