Links Meeting in Edinburgh
The Links meeting in Edinburgh was very interesting indeed. Somehow Phil Wadler had got a few dozen of the world's brightest programming language theorists (including Benjamin Pierce and Xavier Leroy) in the same room. The goal was simple: to create the next big programming language: Links. The presentations were excellent, but it felt like the people had yet to even be sold on the concept, yet prepared to co-ordinate working on it. However, if anyone could create the next programming language, these people could.
Phil's goal is admirable: we need a programming language that takes the traditional three tiers
of Web development (database->script->XHTML) and replace them with a single unifed programming language based on the latest and greatest results in functional programming theory. Links seems at first glance like HaskellPHP, but Phil has greater plans. I think overall the vision is great, but the web development crowd already uses scripting languages, so we'd have to sell them on something else. I think the magic answer is Web Services.
Web Services are nothing but functions on the Web, and obviously a functional programming language would be better than composing them. The alternatives seem to be BPEL, which is huge, has no formal semantics, and is not even coherently implemented, and OWL-S, which is rather academic and also seems not to be catching on. Because to make Links work we need not only the academic community, but the hacker community to jump on board. And the hacker community is currently just toying with Web Services, and upset at the standards bloat. A simple, clean, and functional solution would sell it, and do something PHP can't do!
My Links links are here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/notes/links.html
And here's my original comments on Links on Phil's blog: LISP for the Web!
http://wadler.blogspot.com/2005/04/links-meeting-at-etaps-enter-comments.html
In other news, I volunteered at ETAPS, heard some talks, and got a free hat.
Who's that man in black lurking in the background?
Phil's goal is admirable: we need a programming language that takes the traditional three tiers
of Web development (database->script->XHTML) and replace them with a single unifed programming language based on the latest and greatest results in functional programming theory. Links seems at first glance like HaskellPHP, but Phil has greater plans. I think overall the vision is great, but the web development crowd already uses scripting languages, so we'd have to sell them on something else. I think the magic answer is Web Services.
The cake for Links
Phil cuts the cake.
Web Services are nothing but functions on the Web, and obviously a functional programming language would be better than composing them. The alternatives seem to be BPEL, which is huge, has no formal semantics, and is not even coherently implemented, and OWL-S, which is rather academic and also seems not to be catching on. Because to make Links work we need not only the academic community, but the hacker community to jump on board. And the hacker community is currently just toying with Web Services, and upset at the standards bloat. A simple, clean, and functional solution would sell it, and do something PHP can't do!
My Links links are here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/notes/links.html
And here's my original comments on Links on Phil's blog: LISP for the Web!
http://wadler.blogspot.com/2005/04/links-meeting-at-etaps-enter-comments.html
In other news, I volunteered at ETAPS, heard some talks, and got a free hat.
Me in my free hat...would you trust this man with your conference?
posted by Harry at 3:53 PM
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