thattommyhall.com » Java http://www.thattommyhall.com A Random Walk Through Idea Space Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:13:21 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Faith, Evolution, and Programming Languages http://www.thattommyhall.com/2007/11/28/faith-evolution-and-programming-languages/ http://www.thattommyhall.com/2007/11/28/faith-evolution-and-programming-languages/#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:03:57 +0000 tom http://www.thattommyhall.com/2007/11/28/faith-evolution-and-programming-languages/ I just watched Faith, Evolution, and Programming Languages, a Google EngEDU video. It was by Philip Wadler, a chap who I had never heard of but who has done loads of cool things. He designed Haskell’s Type Classes and Java’s Generics, and is currently working on a bridge between strongly typed and dynamically typed languages. The talk starts off with a brief, fascinating explanation of links (more properly isomorphisms) between logics and programming languages and makes the point that aliens may not create Java but certainly will create (discover?, I suppose it depends if you are a Platonist) the lambda calculus (calculi ?).

For about 20 mins towards the end I lost the plot and could not really follow his argument, but I will revisit it when I know a bit more. I am glad I hung on as the 10 minutes of discussion at the end were quite interesting and Links (the recent work he did not have time to show the slides for, a web framework with every tier written in the same language) seemed very interesting.

For more on the language/logic link, see here

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