Lambda the Ultimate

If you're on a Mac or Windows, odds are you already have QuickTime installed (that is, odds are you have iTunes installed, and on Windows, iTunes installs QuickTime). I'm actually happy to see QuickTime finally making a few inroads vs. WMF and Real.

Could anyone QuickTime-equipped summarize the contents of the page ?

Hmm, actually, I doubt that they use that acronym for "Business Objects' Research Group". Anyway, I don't know whether the Quicktime I have on my Mac OS X system can run Luke's videos, because I didn't have the patience to wait for the mac.com server. However, I did locate a direct link to Luke's Quark/CAL announcement.

Of interest to LtU are

• CAL, their "functional language and runtime for JVM";
• their focus on reusable, composable business components (unfortunately named "Gems", in collision with Ruby's module distribution system); and
• the "graphical language designer called the Gem Cutter".

For LtU archival purposes, here is an excerpt from Luke's announcement:

Here are a few 'highlights' from our feature list:

• A lazily evaluated, strictly-typed language called CAL, with many similarities to Haskell
• A compiler capable of generating Java bytecode with efficient schemes
• Many optimisations specific to targeting a dynamic, OO language platform, such as the JVM
• A graphical language and tooling for interactively developing and testing Gems (also a good teaching tool)
• Debugging features, with value inspection that doesn't force evaluation
• Eclipse integration (still in progress)
• Metadata on CAL entities
• CALDoc (source embedded documentation)
• Fully multithreaded compiler and runtime
• Control of evaluation from Java, if required (suspension, resumption, exploring different parts of the result)
• Dynamic compilation - use SDK to create Gems at runtime, or create ad hoc compositions that might represent specific data flows in an application
• Easy integration to use Java types in CAL and to call regular Java logic
• Exception support
• Localisation and Internationalisation support

windows@work && !qt

pity.

i'd rather see good ol' mpgs.

It's worth pointing out that there are other H.264 plugins for, e.g. Firefox on other platforms. Google is your friend here.

I'm not cluefully enough to know enough to grok such things, but would it be possible for CAL to use something like Monads to wrapper the foreign Java stuff to keep the mutable/imperative things clearly deliniated? It seems a shame if that aspect of Haskell is lost, or there isn't something in CAL from the get-go that is a similar alternative.

[Edit: Ah, I see the text about explicit sequencing and execution context, neat.]