Reuse is still lacking in modern software development. Small elements of reuse - individual functions and types - have been packaged quite nicely into generic libraries, but much of contemporary application development consists of tying these pieces together into large networks of incidental data structures and algorithms, which present a challenge to reuse. One particular area, command parameter synthesis, is an especially onerous part of industrial software construction but exhibits great protentlal for the extraction of reusable components. We are researching explicit models for this domain and hope to demonstrate that many features of contemporary rich user interfaces can be implemented as reusable algorithms parameterized over such models.

I have been working with Jaakko Järvi since 2006 to add language support for lambda expressions to ISO Standard C++. It was finally included in the working draft in February 2008. Lambda expressions, ubiquitous in functional programming languages like Haskell, allow programmers to define small, unnamed functions as expressions. Popular uses for lambdas are as arguments to higher-order functions or as callbacks in graphical user interface (GUI) frameworks.