Lambda the Ultimate

Large Scale Graph Computing at Google - on the official Google Research blog.

Here is an extract -

... we have created scalable infrastructure, named Pregel, to mine a wide range of graphs. In Pregel, programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations. In each iteration, a vertex can, independently of other vertices, receive messages sent to it in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, modify its own and its outgoing edges' states, and mutate the graph's topology (experts in parallel processing will recognize that the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model inspired Pregel).

I wouldn't say this is directly PLT related, but it is a parallel programming model - compute-communicate-synchronize-loop - that is probably of interest to language buffs from the DSL angle, like the GPU programming models.

The latest entry has Joe Armstrong discussing Erlang in the ongoing series of interviews with PL designers (The A-Z of Programming Languages). Two related things caught my eye. The first is the obvious truism about language features:

Removing stuff turns out to be painfully difficult. It's really easy to add features to a language, but almost impossibly difficult to remove things. In the early days we would happily add things to the language and remove them if they were a bad idea. Now removing things is almost impossible.

The other thing that I found intriguing was his mention of integrating version control into the language:

We have mechanisms that allow the application software to evolve, but not the language and libraries itself. We need mechanisms for revision control as part of the language itself. But I don't know how to do this. I've been thinking about this for a long time. Instead of having external revision control systems like Git or Subversion I'd like to see revision control and re-factoring built into the language itself with fine-grain mechanism for introspection and version control.

Not sure what he has in mind?