Lambda the Ultimate

Has anyone created a language implementation where the constraint programming search strategies incorporate the algorithms in numerical computing such as hill climbing, genetic algorithms etc. ie. that you write in the constraint language, and the search can be run using the already available algorithm implementations in the scientific computing community.

Al Bessey, Ken Block, Ben Chelf, Andy Chou, Bryan Fulton, Seth Hallem, Charles Henri-Gros, Asya Kamsky, Scott McPeak, and Dawson Engler. "A few billion lines of code later: using static analysis to find bugs in the real world", Communications of the ACM, Volume 53, Issue 2, February 2010, Pages 66-75.

How Coverity built a bug-finding tool, and a business, around the unlimited supply of bugs in software systems.

This is a fascinating piece by Dawson Engler & co. on their experiences in commercializing their static analysis research through Coverity. It's an entertaining read, with many interesting anecdotes from various customers. But it also contains a number of useful insights about the difference between a research tool and a commercial product, the kinds of static analyses that do and don't make sense in a commercial context, and the multitude of problems caused by the lack of programming language standardization:

Checking code deeply requires understanding the code's semantics. The most basic requirement is that you parse it. Parsing is considered a solved problem. Unfortunately, this view is naïve, rooted in the widely believed myth that programming languages exist.

There's a lot of useful information in there for anyone interested in industrial-strength static analysis. There are also a lot of worthwhile things to keep in mind if you're designing a programming language, and want to make sure it's as friendly as possible to future static analysis tools.