During the first week of May InfoQ went to Redmond for an informal meeting to discuss emerging trends. Normally when we go on this sort of fact-finding mission the reporter’s notes are off the record but we asked for permission to publish them as-is. With the exception of removing email addresses and one piece of NDA material, these are the notes shared within our editorial staff.
Pre-built versions of Dart Editor, the Eclipse-based Dart IDE, are now available, making it easy to try Dart. Frog is a new Dart to Javascript compiler - written in Dart by the creator of the Jython and IronPython projects. Meanwhile the Dart team has been busy explaining the Dart language and proposing features to round out the type system, eg. nullable types and more.
Rich Hickey has announced ClojureScript, a version of Clojure that is compiled to Javascript code, which will bring the Clojure language to the browser and to the mobile space. InfoQ takes a look at the rationale for and implementation of ClojureScript.
Mirah is a new language for the JVM that can do everything the Java language can do - but with a Ruby-ish syntax and powerful metaprogramming. InfoQ talks to Mirah's creator Charles Nutter.
In this article Vaughn Vernon explains the difference between internal and external DSLs and shows the steps involved in developing a complex external DSL.
In a reprise of her ACM Turing Award lecture, Barbara Liskov discusses the invention of abstract data types, the CLU programming language, clusters, polymorphism, exception handling, iterators, implementation inheritance, type hierarchies, the Liskov Substitution Principle, polymorphism, and future challenges such as new abstractions, parallelism, and the Internet.
This presentation explores how Erlang addresses the general problem of concurrent, real-time, fault-tolerant, and distributed parallel computing. The author argues that changes in the world of hardware and the complexity of the programs we write assure that sequential programs will decline in performance but parallel programs will increase performance.
Dan Ingalls explains the ideas that went into Smalltalk, how it was developed at Xerox PARC, the ideas that went into Squeak, and his latest project the browser-based Lively Kernel.
This interview begins with a discussion of functional programming, the use of Scala by programmers trained in Java and the differences between purely functional languages like Haskell and hybrids like Scala. Later in the interview other programming languages are discussed along with the notion of programming paradigms and the need for combining both paradigms and languages to best solve problems.
