Built to Last

Mar Hicks. Built to Last. Logic. Issue 11, "Care". It was this austerity-driven lack of investment in people—rather than the handy fiction, peddled by state governments, that programmers with obsolete skills retired—that removed COBOL programmers years before this recent crisis. The reality is that there are plenty of new COBOL programmers out there...

Sep 2020

Tackling the Awkward Squad for Reactive Programming

https://2020.ecoop.org/details/ecoop-2020-papers/19/Tackling-the-Awkward-Squad-for-Reactive-Programming-The-Actor-Reactor-Model Sam Van den Vonder, Thierry Renaux, Bjarno Oeyen, Joeri De Koster, Wolfgang De Meuter Reactive programming is a programming paradigm whereby programs are internally represented by a dependency graph, which is used to...

Sep 2020

The Simple Essence of Algebraic Subtyping: Principal Type Inference with Subtyping Made Easy

The Simple Essence of Algebraic Subtyping: Principal Type Inference with Subtyping Made Easy, Lionel Parreaux, ICFP 2020. MLsub extends traditional Hindley-Milner type inference with subtyping while preserving compact principal types, an exciting new development. However, its specification in terms of biunification is difficult to understand, relying...

Jul 2020

Applications of Blockchain to Programming Language Theory

Let's talk about Blockchain. Goal is to use this forum topic to highlight its usefulness to programming language theory and practice. If you're familiar with existing research efforts, please share them here. In addition, feel free to generate ideas for how Blockchain could improve languages and developer productivity. As one tasty example: Blockchain...

Apr 2020

Turnstile+: Dependent Type Systems as Macros

In 2017, a team from Northeastern University released Turnstile, a framework for implementing propositionally typed languages in Racket; cf. naasking's story Type Systems as Macros. The system was really nice because it allowed type systems to be expressed in a manner similar to the way theoretical PL researchers would in a paper, and because it hooked...

Feb 2020

Histogram: You have to know the past to understand the present by Tomas Petricek

Histogram: You have to know the past to understand the present by Tomas Petricek, University of Kent Programs are created through a variety of interactions. A programmer might write some code, run it interactively to check whether it works, use copy and paste, apply a refactoring or choose an item from an auto-complete list. Programming research often...

Sep 2019

Applied Category Theory - The Emerging Science of Compositionality

An enjoyable 25-minute introductory talk: YOW! Lambda Jam 2019 - Ken Scambler - Applied Category Theory (slides) What do programming, quantum physics, chemistry, neuroscience, systems biology, natural language parsing, causality, network theory, game theory, dynamical systems and database theory have in common? As functional programmers, we know how...

Aug 2019

Tensor Considered Harmful

Tensor Considered Harmful, by Alexander Rush TL;DR: Despite its ubiquity in deep learning, Tensor is broken. It forces bad habits such as exposing private dimensions, broadcasting based on absolute position, and keeping type information in documentation. This post presents a proof-of-concept of an alternative approach, named tensors, with named dimensions....

Jun 2019

Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory

Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory 2018 by Brendan Fong and David I. Spivak Category theory is becoming a central hub for all of pure mathematics. It is unmatched in its ability to organize and layer abstractions, to find commonalities between structures of all sorts, and to facilitate communication between...

Apr 2019

"Three Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Languages"

The transcript of Three Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Designing Languages, a talk given by Peter Alvaro somewhere or other, is up at Info Q. Peter Alavaro's main research interest is in taming distributed systems. He starts his talk with the provocative thesis, "In the future, all radical new languages will be domain-specific languages." He...

Mar 2019