Lambda the Ultimate

This looks like an excellent introduction to using Coq, with a focus on programming language design: <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~adamc/itp>. People who have been looking for "getting started with Coq" resources should certainly check it out.

'EasyLanguage' should be of interest to people here. It is a domain specific langauge for trading stocks. The goal of the language seems to be to allow non-computer experts to translate their English descriptions of strategies into an expression which describes how trades should occur. An example from their manual:

"if the close is greater than the high of 1 day ago, then buy 100 shares at market"
This is written in EasyLangauge as:
"if the Close > the High of 1 day ago then Buy 100 shares next bar at market;"

I find EasyLangauge interesting for the following reasons:
1. It is designed to be used by domain experts, but not necessarily computer experts.
2. It is apparently quite popular
3. It seems to be related to the logic programming language family rather than functional or imperative langauge family.

While imperative languages are most widely known and functional languages get all the glory among the 'alpha' geeks, logic programming seems to come up again and again for 'end-users' (sql, easylangauge, rules engines).

Just like sql, easylanguage does allow users to define their own functions, but most people are not expected to do so. While researching DSL for trading environments, I keep coming back to Sean McDirmid's paper: Turing Completeness Considered Harmful: Component Programming with a Simple Language, mainly because this paper is the first one I encountered that makes a case against programming in a style which requries creation of functions ... odd since for the past two years I've been convincing myself that lambda-calculus is the be all and end all of programming language theory.

The closest paper I can find to this language is Charting Patterns on Price History. Simon Peyton Jones' famous Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering Functional Pearl discusses the same industry (financial markets) but isn't directly related. Obviously FRP and Data flow languages are also relevant and LtU archives contain plenty of good material.