Wadler's Blog

Spotted by Jeremy. Similar in functionality to one part of Links, where we use CPS to support concurrency in the client. It appears only to support asynchrony, not spawning multiple threads. Unlike Links, source and target are both Javascript, and it is aimed solely at the client.

Spotted by Jeremy on Gabor Cselle's blog.

Another competitor to Links, also noted by Jeremy. Provides a library of GUI Widgets in Java, with "user-experience enhancements made possible by its new Ajax-based rendering engine". I like their online demo.

A competitor to Links, noted by Jeremy.

"GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML."

Eerke Boiten pointed me at this list, which shows progress at producing formal proofs of a list of the 'Top 100 Theorems', using Hol, ProofPower, Isabelle, Coq, Mizar, Nqthm, and ACL2. Currently, 76% have been formalized!

Network Neutrality is the principal that the web makes equal attempts to deliver all content. AT&T and Bell South, among others, want to violate this principal---to offer better service to companies that pay more. This would make it enormously harder for, say, the next Google or Yahoo to get started, if it couldn't pay to compete with the current Google or Yahoo. (But both Google and Yahoo, unlike AT&T and Bell South, support Network Neutrality.)

The US Congress may determine the future fate of Network Neutrality, not just for the US but for the world, when it passes the next Telecommunications Bill, now under consideration. If you are a US citizen, you may want to urge your Congressman or Senator to supoort Representative Markey's or Senator Snowe's amendments.

Here's an introduction to Network Neutrality from The Washington Post, and here's SaveTheInternet.com.

A very specific domain-specific language. Pointed out to me by Guy Steele.

A handy guide. Thanks to The Festival, Edinburgh is well supplied with restaurants, many of them excellent.

I brought an Ultraman mask and Ultra monsters back from Japan for Adam and Leora. Ultraman appears to be a bit like a Japanese Dr Who, in that he is reincarnated in a new form (and by a new actor) every few years.

Computer animated music videos unlike anything you've seen before. Features bizarre instruments that are physically sound but could never exist in reality, such as balls shot from a barrel just so to land on pipes and play tunes. The creator, Wayne Lytle, has automated this to the extent that you enter a midi file and the automated instrument plays the music. David Harel used a clip from Pipe Dreams on Animusic I in his Distinguished Lecture last month.

Graphics tool for Mac OS X, recommended by Benjamin Pierce.

Spotted by Jeremy.

An article summarizing the view that the Universe is really a computer program. (Found by following Gilad Bracha's suggestion to google for serious uses of the phrase 'Computational Theology'; an almost self-defeating suggestion, since that page and references to it now occupy the top google slots for that phrase.)

One reference omitted is Ian Banks 'The Algebraist'. In that book, the principle religion of human culture is 'The Truth', a claim that there are arguments that the Universe must be a computer simulation, and that it will stop only when enough sentient beings accept that this is the case.

Microsoft is pushing this as a web client environment, so we need to track it as a competitor to Links.

Gilad Bracha pointed me to these slides of an invited talk he gave at the Dynamic Languages Symposium (associated with OOPSLA) in 2005. There are interesting ideas here, and some overlap with Links. I'm not at all convinced by his main thesis, that dynamic updating of software works better with dynamic types. But I like some of the other ideas (build code to work with dynamic updating, build dynamic updating to work around synchronization). I'm not sure what he means by 'No Static' toward the end, but it looks like he's pushing what Odersky, in his work on Scala, refers to as 'The Principal of Demeter', which is to enhance reusability by replacing global variables with a pointer to a suitable object; I'm not sure what is 'No Static' about that.