Graydon Hoare: 21 compilers and 3 orders of magnitude in 60 minutes

In 2019, Graydon Hoare gave a talk to undergraduates (PDF of slides) trying to communicate a sense of what compilers looked like from the perspective of people who did it for a living. I've been aware of this talk for over a year and meant to submit a story here, but was overcome by the sheer number of excellent observations. I'll just summarise the...

Feb 2022

Latent Effects for Reusable Language Components

Latent Effects for Reusable Language Components, by Birthe van den Berg, Tom Schrijvers, Casper Bach Poulsen, Nicolas Wu: The development of programming languages can be quite complicated and costly. Hence, much effort has been devoted to the modular definition of language features that can be reused in various combinations to define new languages...

Oct 2021

Introducing PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language

Introducing PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language We introduce PathQuery, a graph query language developed to scale with Google's query and data volumes as well as its internal developer community. PathQuery supports flexible and declarative semantics. We have found that this enables query developers to think in a naturally "graphy" design space...

Jun 2021

Google announces Logica: organizing your data queries, making them universally reusable and fun

You can read more about it at the Google Open Source blog post, Logica: organizing your data queries, making them universally reusable and fun. They advocate for datalog-like language they developed internally at Google. The reason? Good programming is about creating small, understandable, reusable pieces of logic that can be tested, given names,...

Apr 2021

Coq will be renamed

From the Coq-club: The Coq development team acknowledges the recent discussions (started on the Coq-Club mailing list) around Coq's logo and name. We wish to thank everyone that participated in these discussions. Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations, reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning...

Apr 2021

LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function

Post by Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones on LAMBDA giving Excel users the ability to define functions. Ever since it was released in the 1980s, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the millions of people who use it each day. It’s also the world’s most widely...

Jan 2021

Google Brain's Jax and Flax

Google's AI division, Google Brain, has two main products for deep learning: TensorFlow and Jax. While TensorFlow is best known, Jax can be thought of as a higher-level language for specifying deep learning algorithms while automatically eliding code that doesn't need to run as part of the model. Jax evolved from Autograd, and is a combination of...

Jan 2021

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