Lambda the Ultimate

Conal Elliott's weblog post from January, Can functional programming be liberated from the von Neumann paradigm?, makes the case that the kind of coupling to state which Haskell programs making use of the IO monad have, raise problems of the same sort that led to pure functional programming in the first place. Conal then goes on to sketch, with reference to his work on FRP and denotational design, some ideas about where purity should be leading language design.

Roberto Ierusalimschy discusses the ideas behind the design of Lua specially on the pervasive use of tables and coroutines.

Video, Slides[PDF] and Talk Abstract.

Note: The video is in Windows Media format but it works with Quicktime Player on the Mac if you have Flip4Mac WMV installed. I can open the video using File->Open URL.