Lambda the Ultimate

Metaphor is a strongly-typed, multi-stage, object-oriented programming language. Metaphor is based on a subset of C# and is extended with multi-stage programming constructs in the style of MetaML or MetaOCaml. Metaphor is implemented as a compiler on the .NET CLR.

Metaphor features a static type system for object-oriented reflection operations (i.e. run-time type analysis). This allows the reflection system to be safely incorporated into the language’s staging constructs and thus allows the generation of code based on the structure of types.

A lot of language theory goes past here on Lambda the Ultimate, but we rarely see that theory directly impacting commercial programmers.

I'm a great fan of theoretical concepts like arrows, but at the same time I'm a self-employed programmer interested in solving my clients' problems.

Pugs is notable in that it profitably uses recent developments such as GADTs and Template Haskell for an implementation of Perl6.

I recently became a regular on the #perl6 irc channel and soon after joined the list of committers.

In just a few days I've seen a lot. I've seen enthusiastic members of the Perl community learning Haskell. I've seen myself learning Perl. I've also seen how daily Perl programmers work with abstractions like monad transformers. I've seen how some structures are easy to extend for programmers new to both the Pugs codebase and Haskell.

The Pugs project was started 64 days ago by Autrijus Tang, as an exercise while reading TaPL. Pugs already includes network and threading primitives. New tests and code are add at an amazing rate, as evidenced by the smoke tests.

I don't know if I'll end up using Perl after Pugs is written, but I am learning how to practice the theory of programming language design and implementation.

Discussed here.

We discussed Hibernate, and O/R mapping in general, a couple of times so I thought this might be of interest.

An critique of OOP. The article is about OOP as a SE/design approach and doesn't directly attack the issue from a PL angle, but it might still interest LtU readers.

From a PL point of view, I would have chnaged the title to: OOP Is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice, (And the Theory Isn't too Good anyway).

Polyglot is a compiler front end framework for building Java language extensions that doesn't seem to have been mentioned here.

Amongst the extensions is an implementation of nested inheritance which, I admit, I don't completely get. There's a discussion (moderately critical) of the paper in the context of OCaml that starts here.

This caught my eye while scanning the latest Caml Weekly News - a useful summary of the (rather high volume) (O)Caml list.

Grady Booch's contribution to the discussion on UML vs. DSLs.

Along the way we learn about UML specialization mechanisms, UML profiles, and Grady's opinions as regards tool vs. language issues.

Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel was mentioned here in the past, but not on the home page if I am not mistaken.

You can download all but three chapters from the website, and seeing as Lisp is an important and somewhat unique language, you might want to do just that.

The chapters I read were well written and funny at times. What's not to like?

The OO chapters offer a nice intro to CLOS, which might interest those with OO experience seeing as CLOS doesn't resemble your average OOPL.

I must say that it's nice to see "practical" how-to books written for non-mainstream languages.

OO Programming Styles in ML, Bernard Berthomieu.

It is shown that the essential OO concepts and idioms, including inheritance and dynamic dispatch, can be encoded in this well understood framework, without requiring any operational or typing extensions of ML...

[The encodings] do not rely on subtyping and subsumption, but on an encoding of inheritance polymorphism into paramteric polymorphism.

This isn't new (it is dated March 2000), but seems interesting.

The ML module language put to good use!

Thanks Henry!

Jon Udell's interview with Ward Cunningham and Jack Greenfield might help understand Microsoft's methodology of software factories and DSLs.

The interview is available as a 54 minute MP3 file. The notion of language as abstraction mechanism and explanation of the part played by DSLs appear towards the second half of the conversation.

A semi-stable generic function API for Python.

Somewhere between CLOS style OOP and AOP, I'd say.

I don't have the time to explore this, but other might wnat to give it a go and report their experience.