Language – Page 20 – Wisdom And Wonder

Programming with Functional Objects in Scala

At the JavaOne 08 presentation “Programming with Functional Objects in Scala”, Scala‘s creator Martin Odersky summed up Scala’s mission statement for the audience:

Scala is the perfect mixture of Object Oriented (OO) and Functional Programming (FP). You get the flexibility of FP along with the familiarity of OO; along with the awesome power of the Actor model. Combine that will full speed execution on the JVM (in contrast to JRuby for example) along with seamless integration with existing Java libraries and you’ve got a platform that is tough to beat”.

Well said Martin.

Exposing the Depth JDK 7.0 Applications with DTrace

“Exposing the Depth JDK 7.0 Applications with DTrace” was the only lab that I attended at JavaOne 08. As you can imagine, it was all about dtrace.

dtrace is a no-overhead, highly dynamic, powerful programming language used to report on running systems. It runs on Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and sorely neither Linux nor AIX (the two latter camps will roll their own clones on this one).

The tool itself is really delightful; in the right hands it can really work wonders.

I wish we had this on Windows, Linux, OS/400, and AIX.

Monar 0.0.1 released

Monar is a free interpreter for R6RS Scheme.

Currently it covers a little of R6RS core scheme, utf-8 I/O, quasiquote, apply , regexp , traditional macro, 30bit fixnum , simple port , simple CGI and format.

And Wiki works on Monar@FreeBSD+Apache.

http://monar.monaos.org/wiki/LambdaWiki

Downloads and More Information

Source code and Monar documentation can be found on the web at:

http://code.google.com/p/monar/

(via comp.lang.scheme)

GNU Guile 1.8.5 Released

This release includes: improved I/O performance, an object-based traps infrastructure, bug fixes, and other changes.

This is primarily a bugfix release.

(via PLNews)

Choosing random files in Bash

Ben has a good post about choosing random files in Bash:


ls | while read x; do echo "`expr $RANDOM % 1000`:$x"; done \
     | sort -n| sed 's/[0-9]*://' | head -15

Scheme2Js

is a Scheme to JavaScript compiler distributed under the GPL license

It is particularly interesting in that it is utilized by the HOP web framework.

(via PLNews)

Consider MrED

Ben recommends that when you need to write a GUI app, you should consider MrED.

Halyard 2D/3D multimedia engine

[Dartmouth’s] Interactive Media Lab (IML) builds shrink-wrapped educational software for medical professionals and first responders. [They] have teams focusing on media production, script-level authoring, and low-level engine development.

They have released their engine, along with their object system, as open source.

Their system is pretty interesting in that they tackled a lot of problems on their own; and even after solving problems they still had to figure how to get the users to use the new code! Read about it in the write-up on CUFP 07.

Stalin Scheme

is an aggressive optimizing batch whole-program Scheme compiler written by Jeffrey Mark Siskind. It uses advanced flow analysis and type inference and a variety of other optimization techniques to produce code (using C as an intermediate language) that is extremely fast, particularly for numeric codes. In a number of tests it has outperformed hand-written C, sometimes by a considerable margin. Stalin is intended for production use in generating an optimized executable.

(via Wikipedia)

Scheme in One Defun

is a small-footprint implementation of the Scheme programming language that is provided with some database, unix programming and cgi scripting extensions.

The motivation behind SIOD remains a small footprint, in every sense of the word, at runtime, at compile time, and in cognitive attention required to understand how the system works enough to be able to extend it as well as the author would have done the work himself.