Don Syme Presents F# Design Principles at .Net Fringe
Don Syme, creator of F#, presented at .Net Fringe 2016 an assessment of the current status of F#. He also commented on the duality that exists in F#, a functional language created on a runtime built for object oriented languages.
Open-Source OCaml to JavaScript Compiler BuckleScript Hits 1.0
BuckleScript 1.0 brings almost full compatibility with OCaml features and an improved FFI with the aim of avoiding writing unsafe JavaScript stubs. InfoQ has spoken with Bloomberg’s Hongbo Zhang, BuckleScript creator at Bloomberg.
Retrospective: Haskell in Production
Haskell might be “the closest thing to a secret weapon” when building server-side software, writes Better co-founder Carl Baatz, summarizing their four-year journey using Haskell in production.
The New Scala Center Focuses on Education and the Scala Community
Details of the new Scala Center, a non-profit organization created to focus on education and the open source community, were presented by research scientist Heather Miller during her June 16, 2016 keynote address at Scala Days Berlin.
Elixir 1.3 Brings New Language Features, APIs, and Improved Tooling
Elixir 1.3, recently announced by José Valim, deprecates imperative assignments and adds new types and accessors, improves its Mix build tool and the ExUnit unit testing framework.
Clojure.spec is a New Contract System for Clojure
Clojure has a new core library, clojure.spec, that aims to provide a standard and integrated system for the specification and testing of data and functions. Besides making it possible to automatically validate Clojure code, the new specification system can be used for a number of tasks such as generative testing, error reporting, and destructuring.
Chez Scheme Native Compiler now Open Source
R. Kent Dybvig, professor emeritus of Computer Science at Indiana University, now with Cisco, has recently open sourced version 9.4 of his formerly commercial Scheme compiler Chez Scheme.
Racket 6.5 Brings Improved Typed Racket, Faster Iteration, and More
Racket, a multi-paradigm programming language belonging to the Lisp/Scheme family, has reached version 6.5, writes Ryan Culpepper on Racket blog. The new version adds several new features, including improvements to typed/untyped code interaction, faster iteration on hash tables and sets, and more.
JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1
JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1, the latest version of their most popular IDE. The new version seems to have the polyglot developer in mind, with multiple enhancements over a variety of languages and technologies; however, the most noticeable changes are aimed at Java, particularly at helping developers take full advantage of Java 8.
LFE Brings Lisp to the Erlang Virtual Machine
After 8 years of development, Lisp Flavoured Erlang (LFE) has reached version 1.0, bringing stable support for Lisp programming on the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). LFE was created by Robert Virding, one of the initial developers of Erlang. InfoQ has spoken with Duncan McGreggor, current maintainer of LFE.
Bloomberg Open-sources BuckleScript, JavaScript Backend for OCaml
Recently open-sourced BuckleScript, a JavaScript backend for OCaml, aims to bring OCaml type safe, high performance code to any JavaScript execution engine, Bloomberg say.
Simplifying Database Queries with Jinq
Jinq, a library to provide a DSL for database queries, has been made available for Java and Scala. The work is inspired by .NET's LINQ, and aims at enabling easy-to-write queries with support for type safety. As commented by Ming-Yee Iu, creator of the tool, work on Jinq started in 2006 under project name Queryll; however, the adoption of lambdas in Java 8 is what has realised its full potential.
Scala Centre Foundation Created
Last week, the Scala Center was created as a not-for-profit foundation, along with a list of financial backers, to improve the ongoing development of Scala and provide training courses based around the Scala language.
Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend
The company formerly known as Typesafe, inventors of the Scala programming language, has completed their renaming and is now known as Lightbend. Typesafe announced their plans to rename last May, stating at that time that it was expected to be a two month process. They invited community members to participate, and provided blog updates about their progress.
Racket 6.4 Improves Security and Adds Incremental Garbage Collection
Racket, a multi-paradigm programming language belonging to the Lisp/Scheme family, has reached version 6.4, PLT announced. The new version adds several new features, including an incremental garbage collector (GC), and fixes a vulnerability in the web server.
