Lambda the Ultimate

The text for Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice is now available online. The text documents the development history of the Smalltalk 80 language.

• Part One of this book is a collection of papers that provide some
  background and history of the Smalltalk-80 implementation.
• In Part Two we present papers that describe the experiences four
  implementors had in bringing their systems to life.
• Part Three is a collection of measurements made by the
  implementation groups.
• In Part Four we present papers that look toward the future of
  Smalltalk systems and propose ideas for extending the Smalltalk-80
  system beyond its initial form.

via Cincom Smalltalk Blogs.

Probably goes against Dijkstra's advice of modeling real world objects, but Luca Cardelli is exploring Programming Languages for Biology.

If you want to go to another country, it would behoove you to learn the language of the land. Luca Cardelli, an Italian researcher working in England, knows this lesson well. He wants to help scientists travel to an unknown country — the membranes and cells of our bodies — and feel right at home. To do this, he is developing a computer language to model the processes of biology.

From the University of Waterloo Computer Graphics Lab comes Sh:

Writing programs for these GPUs can be a tedious task, as it generally has to be done in assembly. A high-level language allows programming GPUs with familiar constructs and syntax, without worrying about the details of the hardware. A high-level language is also important for portability across different hardware and graphics API platforms. Sh is such a high-level language. It offers the convenient syntax of C++ and takes the burden of register allocation and other low-level issues away from the programmer. This allows GPU programs to be written much quicker and makes porting such programs extremely simple.

See also this recent article on Gamasutra (requires login, free)

Fresh O'Caml aims to provide the features of the Objective Caml language (with the exception of native-code compilation) together with:

• a type of names for representing object-level bindable names;
• abstraction expressions for representing object-level binding;
• pattern-matching for deconstructing abstraction values;

and some additional utility operations.

Fresh O'Caml is Mark Shinwell's sucessor to Andrew Pitts's last summer's blockbuster FreshML. It's experimental, but Tom tells me it's very cool, and I trust him. This work comes out of... no, not INRIA, enclave of O'Caml High Acolytes, but rather the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Theory and Semantics Group. Here are the obligatory tasty paper morsels:

• Fresh O'Caml User Manual: PostScript, PDF
• Introductory brief (PostScript)
• More in-depth ICFP paper (PDF)

More papers than you can shake a stick at on Fresh O'Caml's dad, FreshML, are also available.
Finally, there's a mailing list you can join for information, updates, and discussion about FreshML and Fresh O'Caml

A nice application of category theory to computer science that is rather simpler than its application to semantics tends to get is the single and double pushout approach to graph transformation. Categorical pushouts allow patterns and rewrites on many kinds of structure, in particular graphs, to be specified in a simple manner. The theory can be read forwards, generalising term rewriting systems to graph rewriting systems, or backwards, specifying parsing problems for a graph grammar.

There's a shortage of good introductory material to this idea online. Offline I can recommend Tutorial introduction to the algebraic approach of graph grammars based on double and single pushouts [citeseer]. Online I suggest Practical Use of Graph Rewriting, and I welcome other suggestions.

We are on holiday (it's the Jewish new year), and on top of that there are some problems at work, that may mean looking for a new job soon.

Hence my lack of posts.

I am sure others will fill in.

I had been breathlessly watching Paul Graham's website hoping for news about Arc, his "New Lisp". But I hadn't realized that a group of developers had already beaten him to the punch!

newLisp is an updated (and scaled down) Lisp, targeted at the scripting world. From the web site:

newLISP is a general purpose scripting language for developing Web applications and programs in general and in the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and statistics.

Among its many interesting features (such as useful functions for getting scripting work done, good performance, and small footprint) are:

• Dynamic and lexical scoping with multiple name spaces
• OOP extensions
• TCP/IP and UDP networking functions
• Perl compatible regular expressions, PCRE
• Matrix and advanced math functions
• Financial math functions
• Statistical functions
• XML functions and SXML support
• Tcl/Tk Graphical Fontend
• Modules for MYSQL, SQLite and ODBC Database access
• CGI, SMTP, POP3 and FTP Modules
• Complete documentation in HTML and PDF

While many new scripting languages languish with good implementations, but no fully-realized libraries or interaction with outside software, newLisp seems to have sprung fully-formed, with various useful libraries already implemented.

Newlisp compiles on most LINUX, UNIX versions, CYGWIN, Windows, and presumably Mac OS X. It is licensed under the GNU Public License, GPL

Who knows -- perhaps now Ehud will have a Lisp with which he can finally get some scripting work done!

Ralf Hinze. Generics for the masses. In Kathleen Fisher, editor, Proceedings of ICFP'04, Snowbird, Utah, September 19-22, 2004.

Mentioned (with no link) on LtU1.

Hinze shows how to program generically in Haskell 98, making extensive use of type classes.

Those interested in generic programming should make sure they are familiar with references cited in section 5 (many of which were discussed here in the past).

For some reason many new LtU members choose not reveal their real names. This makes the site less friendly in my opinion, and perhaps even discourages discussion.

I urge people to use their real names, unless they think there's good reason not to, in which case do what you think is best.

Thanks.

In this clip from an IT Conversations interview Jon Udell tries to explain what dynamic languages are.

I think this clip makes it clear that (a) the situation as regards the terminology used to describe type system issues is beyond hope and (b) the issues Jon tries to deal with are quite real.

As we noted many times in the past, "strong" typing is not the same as "explicit typing" and most of the goals Jon talks about are achievable with statically typed languages.

In fact, dynamic - or scripting - languages encourage a development process in which programs are modified and translated iteratively, so having the compiler check the "morphed" data structures and infer their type shouldn't really be a problem, and in fact can help the developer. Naturally, since not all the code is changed at once a language that would appeal to Jon would allow the programmer to restrict the scope of type checking to specific parts of the program (e.g., only routines that may in fact be invoked).

Whatever your opinions regrading typing, I think it is very clear that we should move the debate away from having Pscal and Java as the only examples of strong typing, and C as the only example of weak typing. I hope LtU would set a good example for the rest of the community...