JavaScript, even more so than VB, has to be the Rodney Dangerfield of programming languages. I'm going to blow whatever credibility I might have by saying "I actually like programming in JavaScript." I'm actually building a lot of the screens in StoryTeller with JavaScript running in a WebBrowser control because I think I can do dynamic layout much faster with JavaScript than a WinForms screen. Besides, the point of a "side" project is to do stuff you don't get to do at your day job.
au:chlipala Ur introduces richer type system features into FP. Ur is functional, pure, statically-typed, and strict. Ur supports metaprogramming based on row types. Ur/Web is standard library and associated rules for parsing and optimization. Ur/Web supports construction of dynamic web applications backed by SQL databases. The signature of the standard library is such that well-typed Ur/Web programs "don't go wrong" in a very broad sense. They also may not: * Suffer from any kinds of code-injection attacks * Return invalid HTML * Contain dead intra-application links * Have mismatches between HTML forms and the fields expected by their handlers It is also possible to use metaprogramming to build significant application pieces by analysis of type structure - demo includes an ML-style functor for building an admin interface for an arbitrary SQL table. The Ur/Web compiler also produces very efficient object code that does not use gc
c2005 Most new ideas in software developments are really new variations on old ideas. This article describes one of these, the growing idea of a class of tools that I call Language Workbenches - examples of which include Intentional Software, JetBrains's Meta Programming System, and Microsoft's Software Factories. These tools take an old style of development - which I call language oriented programming and use IDE tooling in a bid to make language oriented programming a viable approach. Although I'm not enough of a prognosticator to say whether they will succeed in their ambition, I do think that these tools are some of the most interesting things on the horizon of software development. Interesting enough to write this essay to try to explain, at least in outline, how they work and the main issues around their future usefulness.
I have been thinking much about Metaprogramming lately. I have come to the conclusion that I would like to see more examples and explanations of these techniques. For good or bad, metaprogramming has entered the Ruby community as the standard way of accom
Staapl is a collection of abstractions for metaprogramming microcontrollers from within PLT Scheme. The core of the system is a programmable code generator structured around a functional concatenative macro language adapted to a 2-stack machine model. On top of this it includes a syntax frontend for creating Forth style languages, a backend code generator for the Microchip PIC18 microcontroller architecture, and interaction tools for shortening the edit-compile-run cycle. It is structured as a code library to facilitate integration into larger systems employing a model-based design approach. The primary, practical goal is to provide a tool chain for programming low-end (8-bit) microcontrollers in a Forth-style language extended with powerful metaprogramming facilities. The secondary goal is to generalize and modularize this approach and extend it in two directions: to provide a standard machine model as an abstraction point for a large class of small embedded processo
"Generalized Algebraic Data Structures" have become a a hot new topic. They have recently been added to the GHC compiler. They support the construction, maintenance, and propagation of semantic properties of programs using powerful old ideas about types (the Curry-Howard Isomorphism) in surprisingly easy to understand new ways. The language Omega was designed and implemented to demonstrate their utility. Here a a few talks I gave that explains how they work. Also class lectures
In most other programming languages, new abstractions are built by writing code on /top/ of existing abstractions. But in lisp, its possible to build new abstractions by writing code *beneath* existing code. Abstract: A partial evaluator automatically specializes a program with respect to some of its input. This article shows how the idea comes up naturally when you write program generators by hand, then builds a basic online partial evaluation library and puts it to work transforming an interpreter into a compiler. 0. Introduction Mainstream programmers think of writing an interpreter or a compiler as a major job, worth doing only for a major problem. They know this because the languages they use every day have big, serious implementations, and the compiler class they took in school had them write just one big, semi-serious compiler. Lispers know better: all the textbooks show how to write a Lisp interpreter in about a page of code.
A compiled, type-safe, multi-stage programming language. MetaOCaml is a multi-stage extension of the OCaml programming language, and provides three basic constructs called Brackets, Escape, and Run for building, combining, and executing future-stage computations, respectively. (Please read README-META file in distribution for MetaOCaml's syntax for these constructs). MetaOCaml is a compiled dialect of MetaML. Download current (February 3nd, 2006) (or archived distributions) and follow instructions in INSTALL-META. For Windows, you'll need Cygwin Hot from the Press!: Science of Computer Programming special issue on MetaOCaml Learn more about multi-stage programming.
Most applications consist of a big number of model- or so called domain-objects. Building different views, editors, and reports; querying, validating and storing those objects is very repetitive and error-prone, if an object changes its shape frequently. Magritte is a fully dynamic meta-description framework that helps to solve those problems, while keeping the full power to the programmer in all aspects. Moreover since Magritte is described in itself, you can let your users modify the meta-world and add their own fields and forms without writing a single line of code.
G. Chari, D. Garbervetsky, and S. Marr. Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems, page 5. (Jun 19, 2017)
S. Marr, E. Gonzalez Boix, and H. Mössenböck. Proceedings of the 9th Arbeitstagung Programmiersprachen, volume 1559 of ATPS'16, page 91--95. CEUR-WS, (Feb 25, 2016)
S. Marr, C. Seaton, and S. Ducasse. Proceedings of the 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, page 545--554. ACM, (June 2015)(acceptance rate 19%).