Lambda the Ultimate

Let's say all data in the world is open to you, for the express purpose of understanding the habits of programmers, and you have the best crack team of statisticians in the world to help you analyze it.

Which subset of this data would you be most interested in, as a programming language designer or programming language theory researcher?

Hi,

I am currently working on a new programming language which I call Babel-17. It is dynamically typed, mostly purely functional, but also object oriented and supports encapsulation via modules. I have written up a preliminary spec of it, which you can read here. There is no implementation of it yet, but I want to get implementations based on Java and on Objective-C out there as soon as possible. Yes, hopefully you can write parts of your iPad programs in Babel-17 soon :-)

Best,

Steven Obua

Edit: The new version of the spec is v0.21, and there is a reference implementation in form of an interpreter written in Scala/Java. There is also a Netbeans plugin for Babel-17 v0.21 available at www.babel-17.com .