David Pollak discusses his conversion of a Rails application to lift, a Web framework written in Scala, which is a statically typed high-level language that looks somewhat like a cross between Ruby and Java, and which compiles to Java byte code for speedy performance (via Lambda).
March 17 saw the deaths of both John Backus (via Lambda) and Tanya Reinhart (via David Pesetsky via e-mail). Backus was a computer scientist who developed FORTRAN and the Backus-Naur form for describing context-free grammars, and was an early advocate of functional (i.e. state-free) programming. Reinhart was a linguist who made many contributions to syntax, semantics, and other areas of linguistics, including discovering the concept of c-command domains.
