Lambda the Ultimate

Conrad Barski has posted a sneak peak from his upcoming Lisp textbook/comic: Land of Lisp.

The first slides may seem unrelated, but boy does the message sting when you reach the ending...

FPers will be quick to note, of course, that this being April Fools' Day the whole thing is a joke and we can all go back to Haskell...

A Modular Language for Concurrent Programming, September 2006, Technical Report by Peter Grogono and Brian Shearing.

How will programmers respond to the long-promised concurrency revolution, which now appears both inevitable and imminent? One common answer is "by adding threads to objects". This paper presents an alternative answer that we believe will reduce rather than add complexity to the software of the future. Building on the ideas of an earlier generation, we propose a modern programming language based on message passing. A module cannot invoke a method in another module, but can only send data to it. Modules may be constructed from other modules, thus permitting processes within processes. Our goal is to provide the flexibility and expressiveness of concurrent programming while limiting, as much as possible, the complexity caused by nondeterminism.

The principle innovations reported in the paper derive from bringing together ideas -- some well known, but others almost forgotten -- found in the historical software literature, and combining these ideas to solve problems facing modern software developers. In addition, at least one idea reported here appears to be novel, namely the introduction of an interface hierarchy based not on data elements or methods, but on path expressions, on the actual flow of control within a module. It is more natural to classify components of a process-oriented system by control flow rather than data content.

Another novel feature is the integration of unit tests into the source of each component, thus reducing the possibilities for testing to get out of step with development.

The project home page is here.