Lambda the Ultimate

Seems there's a new Common Lisp FAQ in the works.

The entries may be of interest even if you aren't a Lisp programmer. Highlights: a detailed discussion on parentheses, and a section on Lisp nomenclature.

Note that many more entries can be found in the FAQ staging area.

It's way too quiet around here, so maybe you'd want to check this blog entry about ST exception handling. Here's the juicy bit:

In Smalltalk... the stack is an argument held in the exception.

I really don't want to start a LtU thread consisting of rants (or raves) about dynamic languages. This subject was discussed here more than a few times, and I am not aware of any new arguments that weren't discussed here before. Still, I think the recent brouhaha over statements from Gosling shoud be part of the historical record that is the LtU archive. And there's even a small chance some LtU readers haven't heard of this incident yet.

This episode of “Behind the Code” features industry luminary, Anders Hejlsberg. Before coming to Microsoft in 1996 he was well noted for his work as the principal engineer of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of the Delphi product line. At Microsoft he was architect for the Visual J++ development system and the Windows Foundation Classes (WFC). Promoted to Distinguished Engineer in 2000, Anders is the chief designer of the C# programming language and a key participant in the development of Microsoft’s .NET framework.

This isn't a technical interview but it is fun none the less. Anders describes, for example, how his team works and how their meetings are organized.

When asked about the future of C#, Andres mentions better data integration (e.g., LINQ etc.), and the mismatch between programming languages and database programming. These are issues we discussed here many times, of course. As regards the future of programming languages in general, we are told that more declarative languages (or language features, I suppose) are going to appear. I quite suspect that different programmers have different ideas of what declarative programming really means, and I think question is worth exploring.

It's nice to hear Andres say that OOP is a tool, and not a religion, and mention that there are useful ideas in language such as Haskell, ML, Lisp and Scheme. I guess we weren't wasting our time after all...

Brendan Eich clues us in about the future of Javascript and, lo and behold, who do we find helping the process along? Our very own Dave!

I'm happy to announce that we are now working with Dave Herman, a fourth year graduate student at Northeastern, of PLT and lambda-the-ultimate renown, whom I invited as an expert to help ECMA TG1 develop sound specifications for critical parts of ECMAScript Edition 4 (ES4), also known as JavaScript 2 (JS2).

The Java EE 5 platform introduces a simplified programming model and eliminates much of the boilerplate that earlier releases required. With Java EE 5 technology, XML deployment descriptors -- that is, side files for defining components and specifying deployment instructions -- are now optional. Instead, you enter the information as an annotation directly into a plain old Java object (POJO) without leaving your source editor. Annotations are a new feature, originally introduced in Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0. They are a form of metadata with a very simple syntax and recognizable because they begin with a leading at sign (@).

Java EE 5 was announced this week. Read the overview for a quick tour of the new features. Click here for some raves.

It is tempting to make a snide remark about the fact the the last couple of items I posted on LtU are about C++, Ada and now Java, but let's not...

A quick overview of the next version of C++ (scheduled for 2009?).

The most interesting language feature is concepts (see previous item).

One of the fundamental goals is to support user-defined and built-in types equally well. This has been a goal of language design for oh so many years now, and we are not there yet. This is a point worth reflecting upon.

Interval Computations came up in a recent LtU discussion.

Are they a worthy language feature?

Torbjörn Törnkvist (Tobbe) has been hacking and hosting a lot of new Erlang community resources lately, centered on the trapexit.org website. Highlights are the Planet Erlang weblog aggregator (featuring our own Chris Double) and erlmerge gentoo-inspired package manager.

This note is to alert Erlang fans that the universe is expanding. :-)

The second European Common Lisp Meeting (ECLM 2006) will be on Sunday the 30th of April in Hamburg. This is a large but informal meeting for Lispers to meet up and talk about hacking over lots of good food and beer. Last year's meeting in Amsterdam (ECLM 2005) was great!