Lambda the Ultimate

In May I will be speaking at Expo-C in the beautiful town of Karlskrona, an official UN World Heritage Site. It is great to see that all the buzz around LINQ is putting functional programming back in the picture and the organizers have asked me to combine a Haskell tutorial with an overview of LINQ, including C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.(*) in addition to my "coming out" talk VB IsNot C#.

This, and the ICFP deadline last Friday have prompted me to write a short memoir of my journey to democratize distributed data-intensive dynamic applications by leveraging the great ides from functional programming. Comments, supplementary information, missing related work, and flames are all most welcome. In particular I am interested to learn if anyone is using H/Direct to use Haskell for programming against XPCOM.

Hope to see you in Sweden, or at any of my other gigs.

(*) I will be using Graham Hutton's excellent slides.

In a recent podcast interview, the father of Wiki talks about little languages, scripting, social software and organizing for collaborative development. Ward Cunningham is currently the Director of Community Development at the Eclipse Foundation.

Ward discusses an evolution from using compilers for custom languages, to OOP and Smalltalk, extreme programming and agile development. He also discusses social software, global collaboration, static and dynamic typing, Eclipse and his personal approach to software development.

Playing time for the MP3 audio interview is 20 minutes.