VT Functional: Eric Smith on 'The Next 700 Programming Languages'

In the early 1960s, Peter Landin published a series of papers using the lambda calculus to provide a semantic basis for programming languages. In "The Next 700 Programming Languages" Landin introduced a number of ideas that would become stock features of functional programming languages decades later. In this talk, we are going to survey the paper itself, as well as the ideas that are helping to shape the future of programming 50 years later.

Date/Time: Thursday, January 30th 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Location: Perkins Hall, UVM

Eric Smith is Senior Vice President of Product Development at Middlebury Interactive Languages. He has been programming for more than 30 years and is interested in the history of computation and how new and old ideas can be used to improve technology implementation.