Lambda the Ultimate

The Edge "World Question Center asks the thought provoking, but overly general for this forum, question "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"

So let's tailor it a little for LtU...

What do you believe about Programming Languages (that you can't prove (yet))?

Recently many javascript libraries have started molding javascript to become more functional: Prototype provides map/filter functions for javascript arrays. jquery is providing 'chained' methods where every method of an object returns the updated object.

Phill Wadler is bringing us Links, a whole programming language for the web.

Automatic Generation of Intelligent JavaScript Programs for Handling Input Forms in HTML Documents by Tetsuya Suzuki and Takehiro Tokuda is an interesting paper about using constraint solving for web forms.

Is there any other such work being done to imporve actual web applications built every day. Are there other ideas which could help developers and users?

Links: Web Programming Without Tiers. Ezra Cooper, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler, Jeremy Yallop.

Links is a programming language for web applications. Links generates code for all three tiers of a web application from a single source, compiling into JavaScript to run on the client and into SQL to run on the database. Links provides support for rich clients running in what has been dubbed `Ajax' style. Links programs are scalable in the sense that session state is preserved in the client rather than the server, in contrast to other approaches such as Java Servlets or PLT Scheme.

Links is related to many of the recent discussions (here's one), and was discussed here a few times in the past. This paper is a nice overview, and a good place to start if you haven't looked at Links before.

It would be nice (and, I think, productive) to have Erik and Philip, who both guest blog here on occasion, discuss their different PL based approaches to web programming here on LtU! What better place to discuss web programming?!

This is the first sentence of this story. This is the second sentence. This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself. This sentence is questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences. This sentence is to inform you, in case you haven't already realized it, that this is a self-referential story, that is, a story containing sentences that refer to their own structure and function. This is a sentence that provides an ending to the first paragraph.


This is the link to the story

After years of effort, Graham Nelson has released version 7 of the Inform language. Inform is the language created by Infocom for the construction of interactive fiction games, such as the legendary Zork series. This latest edition of the language is notable in that it is based on a subset of English, and reads like natural-language descriptions. For example:

The LNER Mallard is a steam locomotive. The Mallard is 4-6-2.
A steam locomotive can be watered or unwatered. A locomotive is usually watered.
A man called Peter is in the Atrium. North of the Atrium is the Hall of Greek Vases.
Brightness is a kind of value. The brightnesses are guttering, weak, radiant and blazing.

These declarations create not only the terms used, but the relations between the terms. Conditions can later be tested using the domain-specific terms thus created (if the cat is on the mat...).

A lot of embedded systems programmers use C and C++ to develop very large and complex pieces of software. Often these people are never introduced to higher-level constructs or improvements to languages to make that software more reliable. I recently wrote an article that attempts to introduce some ideas from different languages to show their benefits. The article is available as:

Patterns of Integer Usage

The article was written for those who rarely look past C/C++/C# as implementation languages (certainly not this crowd). However, I would appreciate any criticisms or critiques this community may offer.