Barry Jay in his book makes some bold claims - basically by saying that, at the core of a program, everything is either atomic or composed. Then things can be easily iterated, filtered, updated, just by navigating this composition relationship. Is this a new frontier in Computer Science for computer languages - or are we just going back to LISP?
Does Pattern Calculus represent a step forward in languages or are we just going back to LISP?
fl.formal languages
One of the main benefits of Jay's recent work is that it reduces the boilerplate code one needs to write in order to traverse data structures to perform operations such as map. The pattern calculus enables one to write the traversal code once for all data structures and have it applicable to your own data structure. This certainly reduces the amount of code required, but does not enable you to write any programs that you couldn't otherwise write. Certainly there are many interesting ideas in the work, but it remains to be demonstrated that it actually works. 