Lambda the Ultimate

I have been thinking recently about why so much programming language innovation is not taken up. this is my take on it...

the people doing the innovating are usually very clever - to design a new language or a new language innovation you have to be clever.

unfortunately, the majority of programmers are not as clever, so while the innovators see the benefit of their work, the majority of programmers don't understand it.

what is needed is for programming language innovations to be packaged or distilled into an easy to use tool that does not require a degree in logic theory or programming language theory to be used.

this seems to be even more difficult than doing the original innovation.

mark.

Increasing programmer productivity has been a grand challenge since time immemorial. In current times, every program written has to be parallel to take advantage of many core processors. The next great parallel programming language is still waiting to get invented. With Array Building Blocks (ArBB), Intel has taken a library based approach to parallel programming. ArBB uses a mix of clever C++ operator overloading and arguably ugly preprocessor macros like _if, _for, etc to mimic C keywords to let programmers express parallel programs. People who know what they are doing could indeed write portable and scalable programs with ArBB. However, novice programmers could easily trip themselves because of the fragile nature of the macros. So what do language purists out there think? Is it wise to promote such unsafe approaches to parallel programming?

Hi,

I've been pulling together a web site, somewhat inspired by LtU, focused on network protocol issues. I really like the way LtU is organized, and Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that, I wonder if somebody can illuminate me about the platform that LtU is built on (looks like Drupal), modules in use, themes, and so forth? (I can't seem to find any kind of description document buried on the site.)

Thanks very much,

Miles Fidelman