Main menu:

Site search

Categories

Archive

Archive for June, 2007

Recursion in Pirahã?

Just found this New Yorker article (via Daily Kos) about the language of the Pirahã. There’s a lot in the article about the debate about the presence of recursion in the language, and what that says about Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.
This passage seems to be the core of the story:

Contemporary linguists have generally avoided […]

Bidirectional Model to Model Transformation Languages

Just a heartbeat to show I’m still alive…
I ran into / encountered the class of “bidirectional model to model transformation” languages recently, starting with QVT. This seems to be a very active area of research, and one that I’m pretty compelled to see work. I’m happy to do whatever workarounds are required in […]

Book: Model-Driven Software Development

I had several books from Amazon arrive while I was out last week. The first one I opened was “Model-Driven Software Development” by Thomas Stahl and Markus Voelter, published in 2006. The book has a website at www.mdsd-book.org.
I’ve only read 2 chapters so far: 1 and 10. Chapter 10 was actually written […]

Dualism in Computer Science

The word “meta” is more popular than ever – especially among computer scientists. I’m convinced that the use of this word is a subtle indication of deeply held and sometimes problematic world view.
The problem is the idea implicit to “meta” that the direction of “meta” is “more abstract”.
This is often tied to the idea […]

Video: Neal Ford on DSL’s in Ruby

There’s another google video about DSL’s with Neal Ford of ThoughtWorks. Neal Ford has a website.
I’m not crazy about the trick behind the English-like calendar language in this talk. Initially as someone who’s studied formal natural grammars — because the right-descent parse trees aren’t the real parse trees. That may seem like […]

Video: David Pollack on DSL’s in Ruby

I just ran across a google video of David Pollack talking about implementing DSL’s in Ruby:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8103284744220333344&q=google+tech+talk
His first example DSL “SiteMap” a great example of how this technique can be used to deal with equality constraints (such as the name of a jsp pages) scattered throughout the scaffolding.
I’m not sure if he’s thinking about round-tripping […]