Lambda the Ultimate

Another draft entry for HOPL-III about the The Development of the Emerald Programming Language by Andrew P. Black, Norman Hutchinson, Eric Jul and Henry M. Levy.

Emerald is an object-based programming language and system designed and implemented in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington in the early and mid-1980s. The goal of Emerald was to simplify the construction of distributed applications. This goal was re- flected at every level of the system: its object structure, the programming language design, the compiler implementation, and the run-time support.

This paper describes the origins of the Emerald group, the forces that formed the language, the influences that Emerald has had on subsequent distributed systems and programming languages, and some of Emerald’s more interesting technical innovations.

Worth a read for those interested in PL research topics which are still in play. Emerald explored a number of topics including distributed programming in the presence of failure; Mobile objects; Active objects; structural typing (as opposed to nominal); Static typing in the presence of open programming (shades of the ongoing work in Alice ML); Parametirized types. All of this while having performance as a top priority.

Previous links to HOPL-III papers.