The founders of LambdaNative are looking forward to expand the development environment of LambdaNative to the Internet of things and have many plans on what to include and expand in the near future. Written in Scheme, LambdaNative has various operating systems such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry 10, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, OpenBSD, and OpenWrt. Primarily used as an in-house platform, the programming language was designed as a simpler and abstract form of Lisp programming language which was launched in 1958.
“We are also developing a sister project, LNHealth, that uses LambdaNative for creating mHealth [mobile health] surveys with support for sensor input, etc.," said Petersen for InfoWorld while adding that the founders interests is “pragmatic, stemming from a need to produce high-quality code with very short turn-around and limited manpower and resources.”
Petersen admitted that the team has realized how important functional programming, and in particular Scheme, are for the increase of the productivity and further development.
According to InfoWorld “LambdaNative's founders have developed applications with it, including Clip, a survey tool for screening of pregnant women for preeclampsia; iControl, for managing intravenous drug infusion; and RRate, for measuring the breath rate in sick children. PART and ECEM have an internal repository of about 80 applications built with it.”
Developed by Pediatric Anesthesia Research Team (PART) in Vancouver, Canada LambdaNative had its first stable 1.0.7 release on September 23, 2015, even though its development started back in 2009 and its core framework was released as an open source project in 2013.
Among LambdaNative features are GPS, audio, GUI programming, various modules, sensors, cross-platform software generation, etc. Released under the BSD License, LambdaNative is currently used for clinical trials of medical technology in over 10 countries such as Canada, France, India, Uganda, Bangladesh, South Africa, etc., involving around 100,000 subjects.
“LambdaNative is a software development kit that manages the details of delivering applications on diverse platforms, beyond the scope of the Scheme compiler itself,” according to LambdaNative team lead Chris Petersen.
"This includes the handling of application resources, artwork generation, code signing, packaging, as well as cross-compilation of supporting libraries. This functionality reduces the complexities of app development, and helps reduce the overall development time,” Petersen added.
The Internet of things has received many controversial feedback during the last years as many tech enthusiast, who see it as a big step towards a better future for humans, are opposed by social observers that have their doubts about how much the society will benefit from IoT and how much its privacy will be shaken.
“There are some people in the commercial space who say, ‘Oh, big data — well, let’s collect everything, keep it around forever, we’ll pay for somebody to think about security later.’ The question is whether we want to have some sort of policy framework in place to limit that,” Justin Brookman, of the Center for Democracy and Technology said for The New York Times in 2014.
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