Lambda the Ultimate

The introductory chapters are probably going to be unnecessary for LtU readers, but once things get going there is a lot to learn here if you are interested in formal semantics of natural language, especially in the Montague-style. And if this doesn't ring a bell - just search for "continutation" in the manuscript, and be prepared to meet old friends (you know who you are) in a new context.

If the contributing editors will neglect their duties, LtU will wither and die. Hint, hint.

End-User Programming has been a topical discussion lately in mainstream software outlets. The IEEE journal Software recently had an issue dedicated to end-user programming challenges; see Joel Brandt's Opportunistic Programming: Writing Code to Prototype, Ideate and Discover and Martin Erwig's Software Engineering for Spreadsheets. Also, a few years ago a consortium of universities formed End-Users Shaping Effective Software, which includes Martin Erwig's PLT work on bringing type systems to spreadsheets.

Recently, Google invited Allen Cypher to give a TechTalk on The Evolution of End-User Programming, which appears to be a recapitulation of his VL/HCC paper by the same name. Allen was the editor of Watch What I Do (an LtU recommended reading).

Towards the end of the talk, Allen mentions the practical issues of knowing when to use what tool, and that novice users struggle with finding the right tool for the right job. What's notable about discussion of end-user software engineering is how little attention its proponents pay to its critics biggest criticism: Security. In the IEEE Software realm, probably the most open critic has been Warren Harrison (see: The Dangers of End-User Programming). For example, Ko's 2009 ACM Computing Survey The State of the Art in End-User Software Engineering only mentions security once, in the context of designing end-user description languages for security, but does not assess how well this technique compares to techniques software engineers might employ. It seems strange that leading researchers in visual languages and end-user programming do not discuss the potential usage of object capability systems, especially as companies try to monetize a percentage of the value added by users who mash-up their service with other services.

Microsoft employee Bart De Smet, who has a widely trafficked blog, has been writing a lot in the past few months about a new library being designed by his group at Microsoft. Here is a whole truckload of blogpost links, in chronological order, which appears to be how Bart intended folks to read it:

Dec 26, 2009: More LINQ with System.Interactive – The Ultimate Imperative
Dec 27, 2009: More LINQ with System.Interactive – Exceptional Exception Handling
Dec 28, 2009: More LINQ with System.Interactive – Sequences under construction
Dec 29, 2009: More LINQ with System.Interactive – Exploiting the code = data relationship
Dec 30, 2009: More LINQ with System.Interactive – More combinators for your Swiss Army Knife
Jan 01, 2010: The Essence of LINQ – MinLINQ
Jan 07, 2010: More LINQ with System.Interactive – Functional fun and taming side-effects

I don't usually read blogs, but I thought this was a pretty cogent series of posts. Also, judging by how interested LtU and the surrounding blogosphere community was from Erik Meijer's presentation on the Rx framework at the JVM Language Summit 2009, I figured people would like this as well.