Lambda the Ultimate

How about becoming a contributing editor and posting directly to the home page?

This seems related to academic work on structured & bidirectional editing such as:
Hu, Z., Mu, S., and Takeichi, M. 2004. A programmable editor for developing structured documents based on bidirectional transformations. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation (Verona, Italy, August 24 - 25, 2004). PEPM '04. ACM, New York, NY, 178-189. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1014007.1014025

Or the Boomerang & Harmony projects.

I think these topics should be of interest to LTU readers in part because they provide an interactive way for an editing environment to develop what amount to abstractions interactively. E.g. by distinguishing between copies of a subtree and duplications of it (whose edits will remain linked together) one distinguishes something similar to C(A(X),B(X)) from (\x -> C(A(x),B(x)))(X), in which upper-case letters refer to editable material and the lambda-abstraction is just to symbolize the linkage.

For reference here are some related LTU threads:
Abstractionless Programming
Intentional Programming
Bidirectional programming

I wonder what other readers think about these connections.

As Fowler noted there is no announcement on the website and you have to contact them to get....something?

Anybody have any info on whether they're going to put out a demo?

in 2009 if you wanna be a player you put some bits out or you have something that totally kicks ass

screw open source, but just throw a bone out...especaally for us excell(how can we do better)

but i wanna hear what dm and zboe hav to tsay about this.....sinc thy hav too much tim on tir handsd

It is a strange coincidence that I happened to read the Language Workbenches article by Martin Fowler just yesterday. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get an idea of what this tool means but doesn't understand it yet. There's even a small section devoted to Intentional Software.

There's some good stuff in there, though I think that their focus is a little bit off. My experience with agile development, working with domain experts, making DSLs and so on has been that language syntax and typing things into a computer is not that big an issue, and I think that this is borne out by the hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of "non-programmers" all over the world who daily program in Excel.

The big problem I've encountered, and they refer to it directly and indirectly a couple of times in the presentation, is teaching the domain experts to specify things with rigour, and to face up and deal with their logical issues rather than ignore them.

In other words, as in their quote from Grace Hopper (in the separate slides, not on the video), "Anyone who can state his problem logically can write a MATH-MATIC program for it." Those of us with experience in this area understand that statement to mean, "the common, untrained person can't use it without professional help."

When they thus state, "Domain representation does not need to be computable" (which I don't think that they truly believe), my reaction is that a) non-computability will not make teaching domain experts about how computers are going to deal with their problem any easier--it's just not so difficult to train them to deal with current "computable" languages appropriate to the situation, and b) non-computability is actually quite harmful to the whole project, because it lets domain experts leave resolving conflicts in domain logic to the programmers. They implicitly admit this themselves about 35 minutes in when they demonstrate error checking, tests and debugging of domain logic aimed at having the domain experts themselves deal with this.

And yeah, the question that really gets to the core of all of this is, "where are the semantics?" I get the feeling that they're on a much longer and slower version of the same path that Robin Milner trailblazed in the 1970s, and with less chance of such stunning (albeit little-known in the commercial world) success.