Lambda the Ultimate

I'm pleased to announce that we are planning a celebration for Mitch Wand's 60th birthday!

From the MitchFest home page:

Northeastern University is hosting a special Symposium in celebration of Dr. Mitchell Wand's 60th birthday and honoring his pioneering work in the field of programming languages. For over 30 years Mitch has made important contributions to many areas of programming languages, including semantics, continuations, type theory, hygienic macros, compiler correctness, static analysis and formal verification.

After receiving his PhD from MIT in 1973, Mitch taught at Indiana University where he and colleague Daniel P. Friedman wrote the first edition of their seminal text, Essentials of Programming Languages. Described by a reviewer as "so influential that the initials EOPL are a widely understood shorthand," the text is now in its third edition from MIT Press. Mitch joined the faculty of Northeastern University in 1985 and has been a leader in the College of Computer and Information Science. In 2007, Mitch was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Please join us at Northeastern on August 23rd and 24th as we celebrate this personal milestone and pay tribute to a great computer scientist, researcher, teacher and colleague, Dr. Mitchell (Mitch) Wand.

LtU regulars will recall that we've discussed DanFest 2004 here before, as well as the talk videos.

MitchFest is open to the public and coordinated with Scheme Workshop 2009, which will be at MIT on August 22nd (the same weekend). More event information, including registration, is available on the MitchFest home page. Following the Symposium, we will be publishing a special edition of HOSC as a Festschrift in honor of Mitch.

We will post a schedule on the web site soon, but for now you can view the preliminary list of papers in the Call for Participation.

Update: added link to HOSC.

Lambda calculus as animated alligators and eggs. Virtually guaranteed to turn any 4 year old into a PLT geek.

The non-animated game was mentioned previously on LTU here.

a recent opencores.com article by Jeremy Bennett.

Open source is well established as a business model in the software world. Red Hat is now approaching the market capitalization of Sun Microsystems, while IBM, the worlds largest patent holder, makes more money from open source than other software (source: BBC Radio 4 “In Business”). Major tools such as the Firefox web browser, the Apache web server and the Eclipse IDE are all open source.

...

Now here's a novel idea. What about open source for hardware? At first sight this seems a non-starter. Open source relies on the nil marginal cost of software distribution, but hardware has to be manufactured.

But a modern silicon chip is typically built from silicon “intellectual property” (IP), written in a hardware description language such as Verilog or VHDL. Fabless design houses may never produce a chip themselves—one of the largest and best known is ARM in Cambridge, whose processor IP is built by other companies into one billion chips ever month. That IP costs the same amount to produce, whether it goes into one chip or one billion.

Hardware is software, and open-source hardware looks like a red-hot area these days. Do we have any open-source hardware developers lurking on LtU? If so please say hello. :-)