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Sake = Rake for Smalltalk

Have you ever used Smalltalk to implement DSLs? Do you have any pointers to articles on that?

See also this blog post for my own experience in designing a Smalltalk-based DSL.

By bonzinip at 2008-02-13 14:09 | LtU Forum | 1 comment | other blogs | 888 reads

MACLISP Manual Comes To The Web

Internet, December 16, 2007—The Revised Maclisp Manual, originally published in hardcopy at MIT in 1983 as the Saturday Evening Edition, is now available on the web as the Sunday Morning Edition.

Nicknamed The Pitmanual, The Revised Maclisp Manual describes the programming language MACLISP, which ran on the DEC PDP-10 and Honeywell 6180/6880. This newly-updated Sunday Morning Edition features many editorial corrections, an enhanced hypertext index, and a Common Lisp Conversion guide that offers advice on upgrading old MACLISP programs to run in Common Lisp.

By Kent Pitman, who also brought us the Common Lisp HyperSpec, the very definition of class.

By msimoni at 2008-02-13 18:09 | LtU Forum | 4 comments | other blogs | 3509 reads

The little b language: shared models built from reusable parts

The little b project is an effort to provide an open source language which allows scientists to build mathematical models of complex systems. The initial focus is systems biology. The goal is to stimulate widespread sharing and reuse of models.

The little b language is designed to allow biologists to build models quickly and easily from shared parts, and to allow theorists to program new ways of describing complex systems. Currently, libraries have been developed for building ODE models of molecular networks in multi-compartment systems such as cellular epithelia.

Little b is based in Common Lisp and contains mechanisms for rule-based reasoning, symbolic mathematics and object-oriented definitions. The syntax is designed to be terse and human-readable to facilitate communication. The environment is both interactive and compilable.

Yet another biological DSL.

As usual, it is best to start by looking at some sample models.

By Ehud Lamm at 2008-02-13 19:46 | DSL | 7 comments | other blogs | 6925 reads

Java the language vs. Java the ecosystem

I don't really like Java (probably even more so because it is my day job), but I can't deny that the tooling around it is pretty fascinating. Recently I've stumbled across some pretty exciting things with respect to concurrency bugs:

Stanford's Chord race condition static detector. (Which even uses Datalog.)

and

EPFL's deadlock avoider.

How much can a language's shortcomings be made up for with tooling?

By raould at 2008-02-14 00:19 | LtU Forum | 3 comments | other blogs | 1476 reads