Lambda the Ultimate

Jon Purdy riffs on Hughe's famous "Why Functional Programming Matters" with a blog post on Why Concatenative Programming Matters.

From the syllabus of the Cambridge course on Usability of Programming Languages

Compiler construction is one of the basic skills of all computer scientists, and thousands of new programming, scripting and customisation languages are created every year. Yet very few of these succeed in the market, or are well regarded by their users. This course addresses the research questions underlying the success of new programmable tools. A programming language is essentially a means of communicating between humans and computers. Traditional computer science research has studied the machine end of the communications link at great length, but there is a shortage of knowledge and research methods for understanding the human end of the link. This course provides practical research skills necessary to make advances in this essential field. The skills acquired will also be valuable for students intending to pursue research in advanced HCI, or designing evaluation studies as a part of their MPhil research project.

Is this kind of HCI based research going to lead to better languages? Or more regurgitations of languages people are already comfortable with?

I have just learned that Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) has passed away. His contributions changed the computing world. As everyone here knows, dmr developed C, and with Brian Kernighan co-authored K&R, a book that served many of us in school and in our professional lives and remains a classic text in the field, if only for its style and elegance. He was also one of the central figures behind UNIX. Major programming languages, notably C++ and Java, are descendants of Ritchie's work; many other programming languages in use today show traces of his influences.

Update

Bjarne Stroustrup puts the C revolution in perspective: They said it couldn’t be done, and he did it.

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011) had a profound influence on the computing world. As others discuss his many contributions and accomplishments, I think it is appropriate that we discuss how these affected programming, and consequently programming languages. Bringing to life some of the ideas of the Mother of All Demos, Jobs had a hand in making event loops standard programming fare, and was there when Apple and NeXT pushed languages such as Objective-C and Dylan and various software frameworks, and decided to cease supporting others. Some of these were more successful than others, and I am sure members have views on their technical merits. This thread is for discussing Jobs -- from the perspective of programming languages and technologies.

Update:

Eric Schmidt on Jobs and OOP

Stephen Wolfram on Jobs and Mathematica

The iPhone mandate decision

A. Dehon, B. Karel, B. Montagu, B. Pierce, J. Smith, T. Knight, S. Ray, G. Sullivan, G. Malecha, G. Morrisett, R. Pollack, R. Morisset & O. Shivers. Preliminary design of the SAFE platform. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS 2011). ACM, Oct. 2011.

ABSTRACT — Safe is a clean-slate design for a secure host architecture, coupling advances in programming languages, operating systems, and hardware, and incorporating formal methods at every step. The project is still at an early stage, but we have identified a set of fundamental architectural choices that we believe will work together to yield a high-assurance system. We sketch the current state of the design and discuss several of these choices.

Proving an operating system correct down to the hardware specification and against a threat model does seem to demand new programming languages and higher-order constructive type theory.

So suppose like many here (?) you are a believer in the promise of functional programming. And suppose more and more FP features and FP languages are becoming mainstream. Does this mean nothing remains to be done? Certainly not! Among the recurring topics that come up for discussion here are support for concurrency, utilizing GPUs, FRP, dependent typing, fine grained control of effects, native support for web programming and the web stack of technologies and protocols and more.

So what would be your priority list? What would be the first article/web site you'd want the LtU to pay attention to, in order to see the importance of what you deem most important for the future of PLs? Who would be your ideal guest for the proverbial dinner? And what would you ask him (or her!)?

Added clarification:: As can be understood from the discussion below, this message has nothing to do with FP in particular. That's just the teaser. The questions in the second paragraph are entirely general.

I found this to be an entertaining and interesting read: the gnu extension language, by Andy Wingo, maintainer of Guile.

Guile is the GNU extension language. This is the case because Richard Stallman said so, 17 years ago. Beyond being a smart guy, Richard is powerfully eloquent: his "let there be Guile" proclamation was sufficient to activate the existing efforts to give GNU a good extension language. These disparate efforts became a piece of software, a community of hackers and users, and an idea in peoples' heads, on their lips, and at their fingertips.

The two features of Guile he highlights are macros ("With most languages, either you have pattern matching, because Joe Armstrong put it there, or you don't") and delimited continuations.

The accompanying slides, The User in the Loop, for the 2011 GNU Hackers Meeting are also noteworthy, because they are not as dry as usual PL fare - instead Wingo revives the spirit of the Portland Pattern Repository:

• "Thesis: Some places just feel right"
• "Architectural patterns help produce that feeling"
• "E11y [extensibility] is fundamental to human agency and happiness"
• "Moglen: ‘Software is the steel of the 21st century’"
• "Building Materials: Le Corbusier's concrete; GNU's C"

[Update: Video now available.]

I don't recall a discussion here on ISO/IEC TR 24772, "Guidance to avoiding vulnerabilities in programming languages through language selection and use." This report describes programming language vulnerabilities in a generic way, and is supported by language specific annexes.

An introduction to this report can be found on page 46 of this issue of the Ada User Journal (how unweb like!). A lengthier discussion can be found in this issue of the same publication.

Rob Pike's talk about the motivation for Go is rather fun, but doesn't really break new ground. Most of what he says have been said here many times, from the critic of the verbosity of C++ and Java to the skepticism about dynamic typing. Some small details are perhaps worth arguing with, but in general Pike is one of the good guys -- it's all motherhood and apple pie.

So why mention this at all (especially since it is not even breaking news)? Well, what caught my attention was the brief reconstruction of history the Pike presents. While he is perfectly honest about not being interested in history, and merely giving his personal impressions, the description is typical. What bugs me, particularly given the context of this talk, is that the history it totally sanitized. It's the "history of ideas" in the bad sense of the term -- nothing about interests (commercial and otherwise), incentives, marketing, social power, path dependence, any thing. Since we had a few discussions recently about historiography of the field, I thought I'd bring this up (the point is not to target Pike's talk in particular).

Now, when you think about Java, for example, it is very clear that the language didn't simply take over because of the reasons Pike marshals. Adoption is itself a process, and one that is worth thinking about. More to the point, I think, is that Java was (a) energetically marketed; and (b) was essentially a commercial venture, aimed at furthering the interests of a company (that is no longer with us...) Somehow I think all this is directly relevant to Go. But of course, it is hard to see Go gaining the success of Java.

All this is to say that history is not just "we had a language that did x well, but not y, so we came up with a new language, that did y but z only marginally, so now we are building Go (which compiles real fast, you know) etc. etc."

Or put differently, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it (or some variation of this cliche that is more authentic). Or does this not hold when it comes to PLs?

In A Larger Decidable Semiunification Problem(2007), Brad Lushman and Gordon V. Cormack of University of Waterloo

[...] present a graph-theoretic framework in which to study instances of the semiunification problem (SUP), which is known to be undecidable, but has several known and important decidable subsets. One such subset, the acyclic semiunification problem (ASUP), has proved useful in the study of polymorphic type inference. We present graph-theoretic criteria in our framework that exactly characterize the ASUP acyclicity constraint. We then use our framework to find a decidable subset of SUP (which we call R-ASUP), which has a more natural description than ASUP, and strictly contains it.