Lambda the Ultimate

Haskell-Like S-Expression-Based Language
Designed for an IDE

(has to have my current absolute super favourite first sentence ever.)

Abstract

The state of the programmers’ toolbox is abysmal. Although substantial effort is put into the
development of powerful integrated development environments (IDEs), their features often lack
capabilities desired by programmers and target primarily classical object oriented languages.
This report documents the results of designing a modern programming language with its IDE in
mind. We introduce a new statically typed functional language with strong metaprogramming
capabilities, targeting JavaScript, the most popular runtime of today; and its accompanying
browser-based IDE. We demonstrate the advantages resulting from designing both the language
and its IDE at the same time and evaluate the resulting environment by employing it to solve a
variety of nontrivial programming tasks. Our results demonstrate that programmers can greatly
benefit from the combined application of modern approaches to programming tools.