Over the past 50 years, which result from programming languages research has had the greatest impact on working programmers?

The mf-apply keyword is for checked metafunction application in PLT Redex. In other words, (mf-apply f x) is just like (f x), but errors if f is not a previously-defined metafunction.

Also, consider applying to attend The Racket School of Semantics and Languages in Salt Lake City this summer: http://summer-school.racket-lang.org/2017/

This semester at Northeastern, Matthias Felleisen is organizing the History of Programming Languages seminar. Look for posts tagged HOPL for updates from the lectures.

“Meaningful distinctions deserve to be maintained.” — Errett A. Bishop

Likewise, memorable quotations deserve to be read in context. In this spirit, I am happy to present the above “basic principle” in its context: Schizophrenia in contemporary mathematics (pdf)

Read on for a brief summary.

If you are interested in learning about the internals of the CompCert C compiler but would rather not read its source code, this post is for you.

The next edition of the New England Programming Language Seminar (NEPLS) will be held on Friday, October 7th at Northeastern University. Organizers are Gabriel Scherer and Max New. See you there!

Performance matters for software systems, but performance is not always easy to measure. At the PRL we recently had a scare with some unreliable measurements. Here is the story.

Racket is excellent for incrementally growing scripts into full-fledged programs. This post steps through the evolution of one small program and highlights the Racket tools that enable incremental advances.