Lambda the Ultimate

December 18, 2012 - The Ada Resource Association (ARA) and Ada-Europe today announced the approval and publication of the latest version of the Ada programming language by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The language revision, known as Ada 2012, was under the auspices of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG9 and was conducted by the Ada Rapporteur Group (ARG) subunit of WG9, with sponsorship in part from the ARA and Ada-Europe. The formal approval of the standard was issued on November 20 by ISO/IEC JTC 1, and the standard was published on December 15.

I am glad to say that the major area of improvement is the ability to specify contracts, something I was urging the Ada community to do back in 2002. The new features include the ability to specify preconditions and postconditions for subprograms, and invariants for private types. Another important area that received attention in this iteration is multi-core programming.

So if you are serious about mission critical software, head on to the web site and see what you have been missing.

Things are too quiet lately, so maybe its time to start a fun thread. I used this question as a lead in to a presentation on live programming I recently gave at a working group, but I thought it would be fun to gather a bunch of predictions if anyone is willing.

What will programming look like in 2020? Keep in mind that programming in 2012 mostly resembles programming in 2004, so could we even expect any significant changes 8 years from now in the programmer experience? Consider the entire programming stack of language, environment, process, libraries, search technology, and so on.

The eighth draft of the Scheme R7RS-small standard has just been published. This draft contains editorial corrections to the seventh draft, as well as changing the definition of eqv? on inexact numbers to the style of R6RS operational equivalence.

This draft will be used for the ratification vote by the Scheme community, though we will continue to correct mistakes before the final draft. Details on the ratification vote will be published at scheme-reports.org and on the scheme-reports@scheme-reports.org mailing list.

Doug Gregor of Apple presented a talk on "A module system for the C family" at the 2012 LLVM Developers' Meeting.

The C preprocessor has long been a source of problems for programmers and tools alike. Programmers must contend with widespread macro pollution and include-ordering problems due to ill-behaved headers. Developers habitually employ various preprocessor workarounds, such as LONG_MACRO_PREFIXES, include guards, and the occasional #undef of a library macro to mitigate these problems. Tools, on the other hand, must cope with the inherent scalability problems associated with parsing the same headers repeatedly, because each different preprocessing context could effect how a header is interpreted---even though the programmer rarely wants it. Modules seeks to solve this problem by isolating the interface of a particular library and compiling it (once) into an efficient, serialized representation that can be efficiently imported whenever that library is used, improving both the programmer's experience and the scalability of the compilation process.

Slide[PDF] and Video[MP4]

Slides and videos from other presentations from the meeting are also available.

Over at Eli Bendersky's website.

I got the following from Susan Eisenbach. I know several LtU regulars who should definitely be in the short list for this award! Please note the January 3rd deadline and make sure you (or your students) are nominated. As noted in the announcement, earning awards such as these can have significant and positive effects on ones career.

I would like to draw your attention to the Sigplan Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. If you are either a recent PhD graduate or a supervisor of such a graduate can I suggest you consider applying? Obtaining such an award makes a person stand out when applying for academic positions.

Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

Presented annually to the author of the outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of Programming Languages. The award includes a prize of $1,000. The winner can choose to receive the award at ICFP, OOPSLA, POPL, or PLDI.

Selection Committee The chair of the selection committee is a member of the EC appointed by the SIGPLAN chair. Other committee members are selected by the chair of the selection committee with approval of the SIGPLAN chair. The SIGPLAN Chair is an ex officio member of the committee and shall adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary.

Nominations Nominations must be submitted to the secretary of SIGPLAN by January 3rd to be considered for that year's award. The nominated dissertation must be available in an English language version to facilitate evaluation by the selection committee.
A nomination should consist of the following items:
• Name, address, phone number, and email address of the person making the nomination (the nominator).
• Name, address, phone number, and email address of the candidate for whom an award is recommended (the nominee).
• A short statement (200-500 words) explaining why the nominee deserves the award in question.
• Supporting statements from up to two people in addition to the nominator.

Video: Records, sums, cases, and exceptions: Row-polymorphism at work, Matthias Blume.

I will present the design of a programming language (called MLPolyR) whose type system makes significant use of row polymorphism (Rémy, 1991). MLPolyR (Blume et al. 2006) is a dialect of ML and provides extensible records as well as their exact dual, polymorphic sums with extensible first-class cases.

Found this to be an enjoyable and thorough overview of MLPolyR, a language created for a PL course that goes all-out on various dimensions of row polymorphism, resulting in a small yet powerful language. (previously)

Not a lot here on Go at Google really. Mostly a general overview of the language, whose major selling point seems to be that it was designed by famous people and is in use at Google.

Visi.io comes from David Pollak and aims at revolutionizing building tablet apps, but the main attraction now seems to be in exploring the way data flow and cloud computing can be integrated. The screencast is somewhat underwhelming but at least convinces me that there is a working prototype (I haven't looked further than the website as yet). The vision document has some nice ideas. Visi.io came up recently in the discussion of the future of spreadsheets.

The Milner Symposium 2012 was held in Edinburgh this April in memory of the late Robin Milner.

The Milner Symposium is a celebration of the life and work of one of the world's greatest computer scientists, Robin Milner. The symposium will feature leading researchers whose work is inspired by Robin Milner.

The programme consisted of academic talks by colleagues and past students. The talks and slides are available online.

I particularly liked the interleaving of the personal and human narrative underlying the scientific journey. A particularly good example is Joachim Parrow's talk on the origins of the pi calculus. Of particular interest to LtU members is the panel on the future of functional programming languages, consisting of Phil Wadler, Xavier Leroy, David MacQueen, Martin Odersky, Simon Peyton-Jones, and Don Syme.