Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages WeblogProgramming languages news, articles and discussionTypes Considered Harmful- May 30, 2008 Benjamin C. Pierce's presentation slides (in PDF) for his talk on Types Considered Harmful. The talk starts out discussing some of the general advantages and disadvantages of static typing. But the aim of the talk centers on the problems of building a type checker for the Boomerang Programming Languague (an offshoot of harmony). Boomerang language design as an example of the need for very precise types some of the technical problems they raise Contracts as an attractive way of addressing..http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2828 Computational Thinking- May 28, 2008 Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every childs analytical ability. Just as the printing press facilitated the spread of the three Rs, what is appropriately incestuous about this vision is that computing and computers facilitate the spread of computational thinking. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human...http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2824 Linear Logical Algorithms- May 20, 2008 Linear Logical Algorithms, Robert J. Simmons and Frank Pfenning, 2008. Bottom-up logic programming can be used to declaratively specify many algorithms in a succinct and natural way, and McAllester and Ganzinger have shown that it is possible to define a cost semantics that enables reasoning about the running time of algorithms written as inference rules. Previous work with the programming language Lollimon demonstrates the expressive power of logic programming with linear logic in describing.http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2818 Processing.js- May 18, 2008 John Resig (of jQuery fame) has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript. The examples are remarkable, check them out (but check the browser issues John discusses). John has a little confession: The first portion of the project was writing a parser to dynamically convert code written in the Processing language, to JavaScript. This involves a lot of gnarly regular expressions chewing up the code, spitting it out in a format that the browser understands. It works "fairly well"..http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2815 Logical Algorithms- May 15, 2008 Logical Algorithms, Harald Ganzinger and David McAllester. ICALP 2002. It is widely accepted that many algorithms can be concisely and clearly expressed as logical inference rules. However, logic programming has been inappropriate for the study of the running time of algorithms because there has not been a clear and precise model of the run time of a logic program. We present a logic programming model of computation appropriate for the study of the run time of a wide variety of...http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2813 HOPL-III: A History of Erlang- May 13, 2008 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..http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2811 |