Lambda the Ultimate - History

Mondrian is going to the museum

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:01:04 -0400

Got this in my inbox earlier this week:

Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 09:01:12 +0000 (GMT)
From: Jose F. Poveda 
Subject: Re: Problem compiling qsort in mondrian
To: Mondrian Team 
MIME-Version: 1.0

Nigel,
Hi again!! And thanks for your help, it's been
quite useful. I suppose I'm the only person
using Mondrian (hopefully), but the thing is
that I'm implementing quicksort in all languages
of the history. The idea is a historical and
multimedia poster with code incrustated on it,
to include it at the computer science museum of
the city of Malaga. That's why I'm tricking on
mondrian and in many other languages that
probably are useless. And I also worked with F#,
Haskell and as I told you before many many
others.

Regards and thanks again.

Jose F. Poveda
LCC Department
University of Malaga

Scary how time flies. Just eight years ago I joined Microsoft as a young man dreaming of bringing fundamentalist functional programming to the masses. Now I am an old man whose language is inducted to the graveyard of dead programming languages. Apart from this great honor, I believe Mondrian was also briefly mentioned in Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel's fantastic "fifty in fifty" performance, but I was too blown away so I am not sure. Will have to watch the rerun at JAOO extra carefully.

JOVIAL: Stand up Schwartz

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:50:28 -0400

Information on the web about JOVIAL is rather scarce. Came across some old grainy footage of a mpeg video of Jules Schwartz giving an amusing speech for those interested in the early pioneers of PLs.

Guy Steele on Programming Languages

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:13 -0400

Things always seem to slow down as we approach this time of year, so I'll post a OOPSLA 2007 video interview of Guy Steele on Programming Languages that I stumbled upon. Covers a range of topics that are of interest to the current and future state of PLs. Nothing too technically deep, but tidbits of interest scattered throughout the interview (especially on DSLs).

(see also prior LtU discussion Guy Steele on Language Design).

(Maybe others have seen this before but I really like the interface that is provided for the video. The list of questions are clickable links which move you to that place in the interview where the question was asked. I hope this catches on for all technical video interviews.)

A System to Understand Incorrect Programs

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:44:23 -0400

An ancient paper (July 1978: 30 years ago) from the long gone Lisp Bulletin by Harald Wertz.

The system describes attempts to improve incompletely specified Lisp programs, without however resorting to more information, in the form of specifications, test cases or the like.

A second paper on the system is Stereotyped Program Debugging: an Aid for Novice Programmers.

The Development of Intuitionistic Logic

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:19:10 -0400

Mark van Atten (2008). The Development of Intuitionistic Logic. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

This article gives an excellent account of the development of intuitionistic logic, from its roots in Brouwer's theological metaphysics, through to its formal presentation by Heyting in 1956. The account is strong on the tensions between the subjectivist motif and the urge to formalise. Via Richard Zach.

Lisp’s 50th Birthday Celebration

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:34:56 -0400

See the Dusty Decks announcement.

The A-Z of Programming Languages

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:18:23 -0400

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages.

Here are the interviews in the series up to this point.

(I'll try to update the list as they become available).

Back to the future

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:27:10 -0400

TileStack is an attempt to resurrect HyperCard and bring it to the web.

Running online there are going to be limitations about which stacks can be ported, which may reduce the usefulness and impact of this project, but maybe a standalone version will come later.

The system compiles Speak (the TileStack version of HyperTalk) to Javascript. If the result is not obfuscated, something I haven't verified, it may be possible to augment the output from TileStack with additional capabilities not supported or not yet implemented.

From the compatibility angle it is interesting to note that they renamed the language and seem to imply they are going to extend it beyond HyperTalk, without giving any specific guarantee about future compatibility. I'd suggest releasing the compiler that's as close to full HyperTalk compatibility as a separate product (or even, if they can bring themselves to do it, releasing it as open source).

HOPL-III: A History of Erlang

Tue, 13 May 2008 10:47:26 -0400

A History of Erlang and the accompanying Presentation Slides by Joe Armstrong are a must read for anyone interested in PL history.

Erlang was designed for writing concurrent programs that "run forever". Erlang uses concurrent processes to structure the program. These processes have no shared memory and communicate by asynchronous message passing. Erlang processes are lightweight and belong to the language and not the operating system. Erlang has mechanisms to allow programs to change code "on the fly" so that programs can evolve and change as they run. These mechanisms simplify the construction of software for implementing non-stop systems.

(Link to previous HOPL-III papers on LtU).

History of Logic Programming: What went wrong, What was done about it, and What it might mean for the future

Wed, 07 May 2008 19:03:08 -0400

Carl Hewitt is speaking tomorrow at Stanford's CSLI CogLunch on the history of logic programming.

A paper is here, so LtU readers can offer their perspectives on the argument.

Scheme macro systems

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:47:28 -0400

[Chicken-users] macro systems and chicken (long), Alex Shinn, Apr 2008.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the Chicken
community, and the Lisp community in general, about the
different macro systems, so I thought provide some
background information and discussion of the eggs available
in Chicken and their uses.

A very nice post that provides a historical overview and implementations of a hygienic (swap! a b) macro in different macro systems: syntactic closures, reverse syntactic closures, explicit renaming, syntax-case, and syntax-rules.

I didn't know syntactic closures before, and find their interface and implementation simple and easy to understand. Any reasons why they aren't used more in Scheme?

An Interview with Robin Milner

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:00:46 -0400

Back in 2003, Martin Berger conducted a fairly lengthy interview with Robin Milner. The transcript includes some interesting tidbits on the development of ML, CCS, and the pi-calculus. Among other things, you'll find a recounting of how Milner and David Park came up with the idea of bisimulation, a discussion of the rationale behind some of the design decisions Milner and his colleagues made in creating the pi-calculus, and Milner's thoughts on how theory should influence programming languages:

I do care that languages should be informed by theories...I actually think the best way forward for us now is to look at concurrent calculi as modelling theories for modelling interactions, whether they occur in programs or in outside programs...Languages should emerge from that. They should be treated as a part of a modelling theory. Up to now I don't think we had sufficient incentive to make sure that our languages are close to scientific models. It's only with the onset of computation as a global phenomenon that modelling those interactions becomes so scientifically important that it is bound to have its effect on programming languages.

History of Lambda-Calculus and Combinatory logic

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:21:52 -0500

F. Cardone and J. R. Hindley. History of Lambda-Calculus and Combinatory logic. To appear as a chapter in Volume 5 of the Handbook of the History of Logic.

From the introduction:

Seen in outline, the history of LC and CL splits into three main periods: first, several years of intensive and very fruitful study in the 1920s and ’30s; next, a middle period of nearly 30 years of relative quiet; then in the late 1960s an upsurge of activity stimulated by developments in higher-order function theory, by connections with programming languages, and by new technical discoveries. The fruits of the first period included the first-ever proof that predicate logic is undecidable. The results of the second attracted very little non-specialist interest, but included completeness, cut-elimination and standardization theorems (for example) that found many uses later. The achievements of the third, from the 1960s onward, included constructions and analyses of models, development of polymorphic type systems, deep analyses of the reduction process, and many others probably well known to the reader. The high level of activity of this period continues today.

Beware: This is a long paper (but less than you might expect it to be by looking at the page count: about half the pages are dedicated to the bibliography).

In the announcement on the TYPES Forum the authors invited comments, suggestions and additional information on the topics of the paper, namely the development of lambda-calculi and combinatory logic from the prehistory (Frege, Peano and Russell) to the end of 20th century.

ACM Classic Books Series

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 22:00:49 -0500

Paul McJones alerts us that the ACM posted PDF versions of some books in its Classic Books Series, which are available to anyone who creates a free ACM Web Account.

Among the currently available books, LtU readers are likely to be particularly interested in Hoare and Jones's Essays in computing science, Adele Goldberg and David Robson's Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation, and Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare's Structured programming.

Long time readers will also know that I highly recommend Papert's Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas to anyone interested with the effect computers might have on education. Papert's Logo remains to this day the best children oriented programming language, but even if you disagree with me about this, his book is a must read.

Why Did Symbolics Fail?

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:52:41 -0500

Lemonodor has the story, and the links, starting with Dan Weinreb's blog post. Yes, Dan Weinreb has a blog, so if you weren't paying attention, now is the time to check it out!

For me, the take home message is from Paul Graham: If the Lisp machines were so gratuitously, baroquely complex, I should really find the time to learn more about them...

Happy new year, everyone!