Lambda the Ultimate

Could I use the new VS XML Editor to edit XHTML and WordML? Absolutely.

Would I want to? Absolutely not.

My latest research interest is a programming language for web application development, building on my experience with XML, Java, and Haskell.

A short introduction and a set of slides are available (both PDF).

Wonder about the language name?

A quarter of a century ago, Burstall and others at Edinburgh introduced an influential programming language, Hope, named after Hope Park Square, located near the University on the Meadows. This note proposes a research effort to design a new programming language for the web, Links, named after the Brunts-field Links, located at the other end of the the Meadows and site of the world’s first public golf course.

And here's why you should be interested in this work,

Other languages for web programming include Xtatic from Pierce, Scala from Odersky, and Xen and Cw from Microsoft. Links will benefit from fruitful interactions with these efforts. However, Links differs crucially in that it adopts database ideas from Kleisli and systems principles from Erlang, taking it well beyond the capabilities of these other languages.

Writing concurrent programs is notoriously difficult, and is of increasing practical importance. A particular source of concern is that even correctly-implemented concurrency abstractions cannot be composed together to form larger abstractions. In this paper we present a new concurrency model, based on transactional memory, that offers far richer composition. All the usual benefits of transactional memory are present (e.g. freedom from deadlock), but in addition we describe new modular forms of blocking and choice that have been inaccessible in earlier work.

The work is in the context of Concurrent Haskell (of course). The authors work from the assumption that a purely functional (they use the term declarative) language is a perfect setting for transactional memory. The reason is that mutable state is rare and explicit.

Among the notions discussed: Interfaces and Design By Contract, Parameterized Types and Types vs. Classes.

A SPARK program has a precise meaning which is unaffected by the choice of Ada compiler and can never be erroneous.

• Technical Overview
• First chapter of a book describing the system
• Back of an envelope summary (my first source)

From the examples in the chapter, I thought it looked surprisingly simple to use - comparable to adding contracts in DbC, for example. I guess the analysis requires a little more effort?

Rys lists several advantages of declarative languages, some of which apply to functional languages in general.

It seems I've become the editor responsible for XML related links around here lately, even though we have on board editors who are much more qualified for this than I am ;-).

Herb Sutter has this fascinating article discussing the notion that programmers haven't really had to worry much about performance or concurrency because of Moore's Law. However the CPU makers are running out of ways to make CPUs faster, in terms of raw Mmhz, and instead will be reduced to opting for multi-cpu and multi-core approaches.

As a consequence he believes that concurrency will become a first class concern for more developers (including language designers) and language there will be a resurgence in interest in what he calls 'efficient languages'.

I'm currently doing a lot more work with highly concurrent GUI applications in Java and discovering that there's a shortage of sensible guidelines out there on designing applications in the face of pervasive multi-threading or even ways of re-organising standard design patterns like MVC to handle inter-thread communications.

Since the only mainstream language I know of with good concurrency features built in is Java 5 I'm left wondering how people handle these issues in other languages.

Does anyone know of any research about designing for concurrency in rich client applications? Ideally in a style that minimises the amount of locking involved?

In 50 years, we’ve already seen numerous programming systems come and (mostly) go, although some have remained a long time and will probably do so for: decades? centuries? millennia? The questions about language designs, levels of abstraction, libraries, and resulting longevity are numerous. Why do new languages arise? Why is it sometimes easier to write new software than to adapt old software that works? How many different levels of languages make sense? Why do some languages last in the face of "better" ones?

Nothing particularly new in this article but you might want to take a look.

I wish you all a happy new year, and hope that you are able and that you want to donate something for those less fortunate.

The presentation will outline how XQuery and XML conceptually fit into a relational database environment. It will cover the organization of the XML in the database, how to type it using W3C XML Schema, how to query it both in conjunction with SQL and using top-level XQuery. It will present the concepts, talk about new developments in the ISO/ANSI SQL/XML standards and present some demos of XQuery in the upcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

On December 3rd and 4th, 2004, the Computer Science Department at Indiana University hosted a conference to celebrate Daniel P. Friedman's 60th birthday. The DanFest web page has the program, links to some of the papers, and photos.

Dan Friedman, of course, is a CS professor at Indiana and an influential programming language researcher and teacher, best known to a wider audience as the lead author of EOPL, used in many PL courses. Who do you get to speak at a conference in honor of the author of a book so famous it is recognizable by its acronym? Why, the authors of the other famous acronymized books in the same field, of course, such as SICP, HTDP, and TSPL.

The keynote address, "Dan Friedman: Cool Ideas", was delivered by Guy Steele, and the star-studded program included authors of the above books, and many previous students of Friedman's. An article in the Indiana student newspaper provides some of Friedman's perspective on the event.

The speaker list also included a couple of (semi-)regular LtU'ers, Oleg Kiselyov and Kevin Millikin (did I miss anyone?) My thanks to Oleg for prompting me to post this.