Lambda the Ultimate

William Cook gave an interesting speech at ECOOP 2009. When discussing his career path, he touches on PLT research,

One thing I learned is that programming languages is a very small research area. As a grad student I thought we were big, because everyone in knew did it. But I found out that we are small, smaller perhaps than database research. We are also very fragmented, into functional, OO, typed and untyped, etc. This tends to lead dilute our influence on the community, I think.

differences between academia and industry

Academia is like page-rank: your value is defined by what everybody else thinks of you. And what you think of everybody else contributes to (or subtracts from!) their net academic worth. It is a closed hermetic self-referential system. The commercial value system is obviously different: it's all about money. In a way this is similar to page-rank as well. The difference is that the money comes from outside the community, from customers.

and a few other PLT morsels that might interest LtUers.

William Cook was the prinicpal lead for creating AppleScript. His HOPL paper was discussed on LtU before but I can't currently find the reference.