Lambda the Ultimate

It appears that the final report from the STEPS program has been recently released at long last:

STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming, 2012 Final Report

If computing is important -- for daily life, learning, business, national defense, jobs, and more -- then qualitatively advancing computing is extremely important. Fro example, many software systems today are made from millions to hundreds of millions of lines of program code that is too large, complex and fragile to be improved, fixed, or integrated. (One hundred million lines of code at 50 lines per page is 5000 books of 400 pages each! This is beyond humane scale.)

What if this could be made literally 1000 times smaller -- or more? And made more powerful, clear, simple, and robust? This would bring one of the most important technologies of our time from a state that is almost out of human reach -- and dangerously close to being out of control -- back into human scale.

An analogy from daily life is to compare teh great pyramid of Giza, which is mostly solid bricks piled on top of each other with very little usable space inside, to a structure of similar size made from the same materials, but using the later invention of the arch. The result would be mostly usable space, and require roughly 1/1000 the number of bricks. In other words, as size and complexity increase, architectural design dominates materials.

The "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems" project is taking the familiar world of personal computing used by more than a billion people every day -- currently reqiring hundreds of millions of lines of code to make and sustain -- and substantially recreating it using new programming techniques and "architectures" in dramatically smaller amounts of program code. This i made possible by new advances in design, programming, programming languages, systems organization, and the use of science to analyze and create models of software artifacts.

..and there seems to be a new research activity with Alan Kay starting up (HARC which might at least inspired by STEPS (if not used a jumping off point).