Lambda the Ultimate

As far as I know the LASER Summerschool has not been mentioned on LTU yet.

We have a fine lineup of speakers, including Miguel de Icaza(who gave a great presentation at the Lang .NET symposium), Andreas Zeller whose book on debugging is an instant classic, Mary Poppendieck whose presentations were the highlight of last year's JAOO, Ralf Back who as usual will ensure sound foundations, and of course Bertrand Meyer who needs no introduction!

Registration is open until August 31.

I hope to see many of you in person on Elba.

Joel Spolsky in Can Your Programming Language Do This? (Aug 1, 2006):

Java required you to create a whole object with a single method called a functor if you wanted to treat a function like a first class object. Combine that with the fact that many OO languages want you to create a whole file for each class, and it gets really klunky fast. If your programming language requires you to use functors, you're not getting all the benefits of a modern programming environment. See if you can get some of your money back.

Bracha, Gafter, Gosling, and Ahé in Closures for Java (Aug 18, 2006):

Modern programming languages provide a mixture of primitives for composing programs. C#, Javascript, Ruby, Scala, and Smalltalk (to name just a few) have direct language support for function types and inline function-valued expression, called closures. A proposal for closures is working its way through the C++ standards committees as well. Function types provide a natural way to express some kinds of abstraction that are currently quite awkward to express in Java. For programming in the small, closures allow one to abstract an algorithm over a piece of code; that is, they allow one to more easily extract the common parts of two almost-identical pieces of code. For programming in the large, closures support APIs that express an algorithm abstracted over some computational aspect of the algorithm. We propose to add function types and closures to Java. We anticipate that the additional expressiveness of the language will simplify the use of existing APIs and enable new kinds of APIs that are currently too awkward to express using the best current idiom: interfaces and anonymous classes.

Phil Windley interviews Ben Galbraith, Bruce Grant, and Scott C. Lemon.

This is an audio show, around an hour in length, and since the topic isn't directly programming language related, I was not sure if I should post the link here. Still, we have been fairly quiet recently, and this show suggests some project ideas that may interest language hackers, so you might want to listen in.

Among the ideas I spotted are: JIT for Javascript, better debugging support for Javascript (possibly via an open standard for getting debug information from the javascript engine) and better ways to handle failure in web services orchestration.

This is related to previous discussions of what might be called the Web 2.0 programming model. See, for example, the discussion of the Google Web Toolkit, my suggestions about a google DSL here , Microsoft Atlas, and the various discussions about Ruby on Rails.