Lambda the Ultimate

Whatever happened to reactive programming? FRP in particular -- there was a flurry of activity at Yale over the past decade or so, but it appears to have petered out, and nobody else has picked up on it or tried variants.

(By "reactive programming" I mean using the "signals and systems" paradigm to building a real-time program, (e.g. as in Labview or in some signal processing languages), but fleshed out enough to have a coherent semantics and to be able to do all the other things a PL needs to. Most attempts at this from the programming languages mainstream, dating from Lucid, have tried to use streams...)

--Josh

It seems that Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures was published fifty years ago this month. Unquestionably a historic event as far as linguistics and cognitive science is concerned.

Just the other day I had a conversation with a (non CS) colleague about Chomsky. My friend argued that Chomsky is regarded as very important for CS. Not going into a full historical analysis I argued that most CS people are unaware of Chomsky, or at least don't see him as all that crucial to the discipline of CS. A CS undergrad probably encounters Chomsky when learning about the Chomsky Hierarchy in a formal languages course - which deals mostly with regular and context free languages, the lower rungs of the hierarchy.

A more cautious historical analysis will show how Chomsky influenced CS, as well as much else, but I think my assessment of the way most computer scientists view Chomsky's impact on the field is fairly accurate. Still, many of us are interested in languages in general, as well as programming languages, and in the interaction between PLT and linguistics. So I think LtU is a good place to mention the fiftieth anniversary of Syntactic Structures, surely a landmark affair in 20th century science.