Lambda the Ultimate

Keep watching the video.

In my mind its not so much that this stuff is new, its that he does it well. Thats a very different (but at least as worthwhile) target.

I wonder if you watched the rest of the video, and whether your opinion changed at all? Anyway, also see some of the comments on the paper (start here) for some idea of what has impressed people. I'd say it's the convergence of a number of different interesting ideas, some of which are new and some of which are just well-executed or combined in a novel way.

(in the great tradition of /. i haven't RTFA yet)

...thank goodness somebody out there isn't willing to sit still with the status quo. i think we need more possibly-hare-brained schemes like these as an occasional shot-in-the-arm, fire-under-the-ass.

One of the main differences is that it offloads a lot of the work onto the computer. Whereas pattern matching as seen in Haskell etc will check cases sequentially. In other words, it ensures that functions are total, and that there are no overlaps between cases (it provides automatic resolution when it is introduced). Each column may be viewed in isolation from the others (assuming the tree within doesn't depend on other columns with disjoint conditions).

There are also some other very cool ideas involved. Writing code for a particular example case, such that it is evaluated right in the IDE as you work on it. Function tree expanding to debug. Function names as comments not identifiers. Probably more, even.

I would like to see him use this on more complicated, user defined predicates, though. That would really be something. It would require some voodoo to have all the capability of the integer/bool types, I think.