Lambda the Ultimate

The 2nd draft of the SPARQL Query Language for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) was published a few days ago by the W3C's RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG). It's very SQL-like in syntax, but the fact that the data being queried is a graph brings in a raft of issues, as do things like RDF's support for (XML Schema) typed literals alongside named classes/instances. Early implementations include Rasqal (demo - Rasqal's C source, with lots of language bindings) and ARQ for Java. There's a public mailing list for comments.

Once the query language is hammered out then RDF triplestores should make a viable alternative to SQL/RDBMSs, especially for use on the Web and with other 'unstructured' data.

I think Box should get some input from the LtU community...

I hope the other contributors will continue to take up the slack, and I'll try to get back to posting more regularly soon.

Frank Buss commented on c.l.l. how he never really understood how to use higher order functions as combinators, until he read the article from Peter Henderson about Functional Geometry. He has written his own article about how he used these concepts and Common Lisp to re-create the famous recursive fish drawing by M.C. Escher.

Nothing new for most readers, but it's fun anyway.

This is an absolutely blinding hack. See if you can guess how it's done before looking at the recipe...

What follows will be a very subjective and personal view, as much my own history and development in the field and how things looked through my eyes as about the development of the field itself.

This essay is a longer version of the introductory essay in (Partee 2004). The introductory essay was first written in this long form in February 2003, but had to be cut down to about half the size to fit in the book...

This essay is about natural language semantics, but you'll find old friends here: lambdas, bindings, types, quantifiers etc. If you are lazy, go directly to footnote 25...

No surprise, really, if you follow the links we give here from time to time about TLGs and such.

This article by Steve Maine argues that SOAP may be used as a canonical form for all varieties of messaging between participants in a distributed system, because they are all isomorphic to each other anyway:

For example, RPC and Messaging have already been shown to be isomorphic models of the same thing. There are similar dualities between "messages sent to a stateful service" and "methods called on a stateful object". All of these ideas are just attempts to build a conceptual model around the interactions between distributed systems. Unfortunately, each of these thought-models carries with it a certain amount of implicit semantic baggage, and that fact has really hampered the development of scalable, widely interoperable distributed systems to date.

I'm not sure if it's a rat I smell, or just my own inherent dislike of SOAP.

Dear Sir, I tried your distributed messaging protocol three years ago, and since then I have used no other...

This paper presents the Kell calculus, a family of distributed process calculi, parameterized by languages for input patterns, that is intended as a basis for studying component-based distributed programming. The Kell calculus is built around a pi-calculus core, and follows five design principles which are essential for a foundational model of distributed and mobile programming: hierarchical localities, local actions, higher-order communication, programmable membranes, and dynamic binding. The paper discusses these principles, and defines the syntax and operational semantics common to all calculi in the Kell calculus family. The paper provides a co-inductive characterization of contextual equivalence for Kell calculi, under sufficient conditions on pattern languages, by means of a form of higher-order bisimulation called strong context bisimulation. The paper also contains several examples that illustrate the expressive power of Kell calculi.

NB: a family of calculi, parameterized by languages

See also: The Kell Calculus

In this page you will find information about the current state of the Kell calculus, links to published papers and drafts, information about where the Kell calculus is going[...]

In 1974, Daniel P. Friedman published a little book called The Little LISPer. It was only 68 pages, but it did a remarkable thing...

JavaScript has much in common with Scheme. It is a dynamic language. It has a flexible datatype (arrays) that can easily simulate s-expressions. And most importantly, functions are lambdas.

Because of this deep similarity, all of the functions in The Little Schemer can be written in JavaScript.

Show your Javascripting friends the light...

We've been using C# for a couple of years now, and are getting tired of the verbosity. Especially tired of copy/pasting and changing a couple of identifiers, and I imagine many other people are, too. After seeing some of the macro capabilities of Lisp, we got jealous. After some googling and browsing, I ran across Ned Batchelder's python-based code generation tool, Cog.

A nice description of using coge generation in real life. Might help explain the idea to programmers unfamiliar with the technique.