Lambda the Ultimate

From time to time, and for various reasons, it makes sense to move certain discussions off LtU. This happens when the discussion becomes to specific (say about the design of a particular project), too chaotic, or fails to confrom to the LtU policy.

Many LtU readers have personal websites, such as blogs, that they can use to host such discussions. Others may be motivitated enough to set something up for the purpose of a specific discussion (setting up a blog is can be free and easy, on one of several blog hosting providers). email can also be used for discussions between a select group of indvidulas.

However, it sometimes makes sense to have a shared discussion space, and yet setting up a site would be overkill. In these situations, I recommend QuickTopic. It is easy to use, and robust.

The only thing you need to do to allow others to join a quicktopic discussion space is to share the URL with them (the urls are randomly generated, so if you keep the url secret probably only you and your friends will be able to find the discussion). If you decide to use quicktopic to take a LtU discussion offline, due to the reasons I outlined above, feel free to post the url in the relevant LtU thread, so other members can join you on quicktopic if they wish.

Compositional functional languages like Cat and Joy require an explicit function application operation. I was calling the function application operation in Cat "eval", as in evaluate function, but this carries with it the stigma of the "eval" operation in JavaScript and other languages that operates on strings. So what's a language designer to do? Joy uses "i" which I dislike intensely. Someone suggested "exec" but that for me sounds too imperative. I am currently leaning towards "app" as a mnemonic for "apply".

Any thoughts on what the function application operator should be called?