Lambda the Ultimate

An enjoyable 25-minute introductory talk: YOW! Lambda Jam 2019 - Ken Scambler - Applied Category Theory (slides)

What do programming, quantum physics, chemistry, neuroscience, systems biology, natural language parsing, causality, network theory, game theory, dynamical systems and database theory have in common?

As functional programmers, we know how useful category theory can be for our work - or perhaps how abstruse and distant it can seem. What is less well known is that applying category theory to the real world is an exciting field of study that has really taken off in just the last few years. It turns out that we share something big with other fields and industries - we want to make big things out of little things without everything going to hell! The key is compositionality, the central idea of category theory.

Previously: Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory.

(via Brian McKenna)

Simon Peyton Jones has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Royal Society biography reads:

Simon's main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.

More generally, Simon is interested in language design, rich type systems, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation -- that is one reason he loves functional programming so much.

Simon is also chair of Computing at School, the grass-roots organisation that was at the epicentre of the 2014 reform of the English computing curriculum.

Congratulations SPJ!

The most recent version of Objective Caml is 3.09.0. It was released on 2005-10-27.

Some of the highlights in release 3.09 are:

• Introduction of private row types, for abstracting the row variable in object and variant types.
• Added warnings Y and Z for local variables that are bound but never used.
• More portable implementation of the -pack option to ocamlopt.

For more information, please consult the comprehensive list of changes.

In the past decade game semantics has emerged as a new and successful paradigm in the field of semantics of logics and programming languages. Game semantics made its breakthrough in computer science in the early 90s, providing an innovative set of methods and techniques for the analysis of logical systems. Subsequently, game-semantic techniques led to the development of the first syntax-independent fully-abstract models for a variety of programming languages, ranging from the purely functional to languages with non-functional features such as control, references or concurrency. There are also emerging connections between game semantics and other semantic theories, notably theories of concurrency such as the pi-calculus, and traditional tree-based semantics of lambda calculi. In addition to semantic analysis, an algorithmic approach to game semantics has recently been developed, with a view to applications in computer assisted verification and program analysis.

The aim of the workshop is to provide opportunity for interaction with other Etaps'05 events and to become a major meeting point in the research area of Game Semantics and its applications.

In case you are in Edinburgh on April 2-3, here is the workshop program.

O'Reilly has an article, Introducing Comega, which covers some of the basic features of Cω: streams, "choice" and "nullable" types, anonymous structs and syntax support for XPath and relational query constructs.

I begin to see the point of language integration for XML processing, although the thought of using XML for general data storage and management still gives me the shivers...

Slashdot today links to an interview with David Roundy, the author of darcs, one of a number of proposed replacements for CVS. Darcs is, rather thrillingly, based on a theory of patches with roots in quantum mechanics, a notion which Roundy brings down to earth a little in the interview:

At its most basic level, the theory of patches is about the commutation, or reordering, of changes in such a way that their meaning doesn't change. The rules of commutation tell us when, for example, one patch requires another, since dependent patches cannot be commuted. Once the commutation primitives have been worked out, one can do all sorts of interesting (and useful) operations, such as merging. And such operations can be shown to be independent of order, i.e. it doesn't matter whether you merge patch A or patch B first, you'll get the same result.

Also interesting is his choice of Haskell for an implementation language, and the reasons he gives for this:

Haskell is just a great language in which to program. It is purely functional, and lazy, both of which allow you to do really cool tricks. For example, by using lazy IO I can cleanly separate the file and directory reading, from the patch-applying (which is pure functional code), from the file or directory writing. Haskell also is a really good match for implementing the primitive patch operations, with its pattern-matching syntax and higher order functions.

Roundy also notes that he has had no difficulty finding Haskell coders to help with the project:

There seem to be quite a few people out there just looking for somewhere to use Haskell! And in fact, there have also been developers who learned Haskell expressly for the purpose of contributing to darcs.