Lambda the Ultimate

Recently i had a look on Roskind's C++ grammar. It is used by Yacc to generate parser for C++. But in gcc and even in eclipse CDT's parser these people havent used parser generated by Yacc. I tried to find out why LALR grammar of C++ is not a popular choice for these tools. Somewhere I read that it is difficult to build the symbol table with LALR parsing of C++. Is it correct? why it is so?

A March 27, 2007 draft of a paper by Conal Elliot:

We present a user-friendly approach to unifying program creation and execution, based on a notion of “tangible values” (TVs), which are visual and interactive manifestations of pure values. Programming happens by gestural composition of TVs. Our goal is to give end-users the ability to create parameterized, composable content without imposing the usual abstract and linguistic working style of programmers. We hope that such a system will put the essence of programming into the hands of many more people, and in particular people with artistic/visual creative style.

In realizing this vision, we develop algebras for visual presentation and for “deep” function application, where function and argument may both be nested within a structure of tuples, functions, etc. Composition gestures are translated into chains of combinators that act simultaneously on statically typed values and their visualizations.

An eWeek article reports that "A group of software gurus gathered at TheServerSide Java Symposium to discuss the future of programming, saying we should expect to see more dynamic languages and possibly a new major language in the next five years." Some predictions mentioned:

• "More scripting languages added to the JVM" - Eugene Ciurana, enterprise architect at Walmart.com
• "More in the way of language experimentation" - Ted Neward, founder of Neward & Associates
• "In languages I hope we get to something that has a message-based paradigm." - Adrian Colyer, CTO of Interface21.
• "I think we're five years from the next big language—to be where Java is today" - Gil Tene, CTO of Azul Systems.

The authors of the next big language better hurry up and release it!

I find it interesting to see this degree of receptivity to new languages within a single language community, i.e. at a Java conference. Are attitudes towards new languages changing, perhaps because there's more awareness of alternative approaches these days?