NULL

BitC seems to be an effort to get provable correct programs and thus maybe an Operating System which works flawless. They also develop coyotos    which is a step in this direction.

maybe this would be a starting point to have a lightweight OS for Performant Virtual Servers.

im just watching the clojure  (lisp flavored lang for the JVM) presentations from Rick Hickey.
then i found LFE  lisp flavored erlang. i think i already mentioned Tim Burks  Nu earlier.
(Rick Hickey also did dotlisp guess what? yup lisp for .net. there are also others e.g. IronLisp) so now we have a lisp for BEAM, JVM and the Objective-C runtime, seems like  something that was in the air.

combine: there is a need for a dynamic language which is scalable but still can leverage existing code.
thinking a bit further and adding the other main stream approach to scale these days (virtualization) we get pushed to a new light-weight operating system which supports just a VM and basic IO like TCP/IP.

already with these large scale rails setups we have today, i see no point to have a fully featured OS with a 5+M LOC kernel running just to provide a VM which does just some calculating on proxied data from client data to its persistance.

hmm… erlang for minix 3 anyone?

altough not new i just discovered hecl.

“The Hecl Programming Language is a high-level, open source scripting language implemented in Java. It is intended to be small, extensible, extremely flexible, and easy to learn and use. Infact, it’s small enough that it runs on J2ME-enabled cell phones!”

sounds like fun. http://www.hecl.org/

on to something new and cutting edge, here is reia:
all the goodies from erlang, the lang of ruby and python intendation. can’t wait to try.
meanwhile check: http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language

Vidar Hokstad has a nice series on writing a compiler in ruby: http://www.hokstad.com/tag/compiler%20in%20Ruby%20bottom%20upa more general view on computer science is given in this lecture:Building a Modern Computer from First Principleshttp://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507

some nice merb urls

a comparison with rails

an open source book about merb

AOP for ruby

interesting post about deferred requests with merb ebb and thin by ezra

A Short List of Programming Languages nobody needs nor understands:

Here Piet: all about colors
Intercal
Unlambda
Befunge 93
Malbolge
Brainfuck