Lambda the Ultimate

Here is David Wagner's TechTalk about object capability security and Joe-E, the capability secure subset of Java. Here is the Joe-E site, including the specification and sources.

* snip snip .. this was alot longer than i expected.. ill rewrite **

Imagine: You take part in a competition to design the syntax of a programming language for people who have never programmed anything before (short-term goal!), but are about to become professional programmers for the rest of their lives (long-term goal!). You want to win the competition, so be realistic. Don't mention your favorite language just because *you* like it, but because you think that it's highly user-friendly for newbies and that it scales enough as experience grows.

1. What type of syntax should this programming language have?

• C/Java
• Python
• Haskell
• Lisp
• Forth
• Smalltalk without math precedence: 1+2*3 = (1+2)*3
• Smalltalk, but with math precedence: 1+2*3 = 1+(2*3)
• Other

2. Do you think it's important to respect math precedence?

Please focus on the answers and don't add more than a short note to your reply, if at all. Put your answer at the top. This will help me evaluate the result.

In case most people choose "Other" as the best syntax I'll start another discussion about what it should look like.

Nearly two years ago I posted Beyond LINQ: A Manifesto For Distributed Data-Intensive Programming on this forum. Now, within a period of a few weeks, both LINQ as well as a rather different realization of my original post-LINQ plans are shipping. I am particularly proud to announce that a community preview of Volta is available for immediate download from http://labs.live.com/volta/.

Volta is a collection of tools that enable programmers to develop asynchronous and distributed (including but not limited to AJAX) applications by successive refactoring of normal, sequential, programs written in standard .NET languages (this CTP requires Visual Studio 2008) and deploy the resulting applications on a wide variety of target platforms (this CTP supports Internet Explorer and FireFox). Or as I sometimes say when I am trying to sound like a marketing person “ Volta stretches the .NET platform to cover the Cloud.” Volta allows programmers to concentrate on the essential complexity involved in building AJAX application and have our tools take care of the gory details and accidental complexity.

When using Volta, programmers can specify their intent of running certain classes on the server by decorating the class declaration using a [RunAtOrigin()] attribute. The Volta post-compiler then weaves in (you never heard me say that I thought AOP was a bad idea did you :-) all the necessary boilerplate code to partition the original program to run across multiple tiers. Similarly, programmers can create an asynchronous version of a method by decorating an empty method declaration of a related signature with an [Async()] attribute. Again, the Volta post-compiler takes care of all the boilerplate code under the hood to enable asynchronous invocation of the target method. Another pain point in writing AJAX applications is supporting multiple browsers. To ease this pain, Volta includes Scott Isaac’s cross-browser compatibility layer that is also used in Windows Live.

Volta embraces the Lean Programming principle of delaying irreversible decisions until the last possible responsible moment. In particular we want to delay decisions about distribution as long as possible. To help developers make informed decisions about the distribution a program across tiers, the Rotunda profiler from MSR is fully integrated in the Volta toolchain. By automatically injection hooks for all interesting events, Rotunda creates trace information that can be inspected using the standard Service Trace Viewer tool.

When I speak about Volta or show a demo, the best compliment I can get is when people say this is “trivial” or “really straightforward”. The best tools are those that do their work unobtrusive hidden in the background. Anyway, with the holidays around the corner you may have some spare cycles to give Volta a spin and let us know what you think!