blog.sigplan.org| SIGPLAN Blog

Blog Contact Select Page PL Perspectives Perspectives on computing and technology from and for those with an interest in programming languages. AI Software Should be More Like Plain Old Software by Emery Berger and Ben Zorn on Apr 23, 2024 | Tags: AI software , correctness , programming , systems A Tale of Two Softwares: In a world where AI is revolutionizing the way we interact with technology, a new type of software emerges: AI Software (AISW). But with great power comes great responsibility, and the systems research community must rise to the challenge of ensuring AISW is as robust, secure, and safe as its predecessor, Plain Old Software (POSW). Read more... Teaching Category Theory to Computer Scientists by Justin Hsu on Apr 4, 2023 | Tags: category theory , education Category theory has long served as a deep mathematical theory for investigations in programming languages and semantics. Recent years have seen renewed interest in applying category theory to programming languages. This past fall, I redesigned a graduate class called Category Theory for Computer Scientists”. Though I admittedly do not consider myself to be an expert in category theory, I think the design of this kind of class is underexplored and there is room for experimentation. Here, I’d like to describe my experience teaching category theory to computer scientists and what I learned. Read more... From Research Prototypes to Continuous Integration: Guiding the Design and Implementation of JavaScript by Sukyoung Ryu and Jihyeok Park on Jan 12, 2023 | Tags: continuous integration , javascript , language design , mechanized specification The open-source development of the JavaScript programming language is now automatically checked. The language specification written in English is type checked, and the tests are checked for conformance to the specification. This blog post presents how research papers became continuously integrated into the development of a real-world programming language. Read more... Hybrid SPLASH 2021 Retrospective by Alex Potanin on Aug 25, 2022 | Tags: climate change , conferences , diversity , hybrid Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many conferences were held online starting in late March 2020, and several of us helped with the fully virtual offering of SPLASH 2020. By mid-2021, however, vaccination was widespread and effective at preventing COVID infection and severe disease, and it became feasible to consider in-person attendance at conferences. Polls of authors and the larger community indicated strong interest in holding an in-person version of SPLASH. Still, as of October 2021 the US had not relaxed its travel restrictions on people from large parts of the world, and even beyond that some people would not be able to travel to SPLASH. We therefore decided to offer SPLASH as a Hybrid conference in October 2021, offering both in-person and virtual attendance options. We were also excited about piloting a hybrid conference, because there are many longer-term benefits if we can run them well, including supporting both in-person networking and accessibility for attendees who can only attend remotely. We knew doing so would be hard, but we also hoped to learn valuable lessons. SPLASH 2021 turned out to be an interesting case study as the first major post-COVID PL conference to go hybrid, and one of the earliest across the ACM as well. Read more... Coping with Copilot by Emery Berger on Aug 18, 2022 | Tags: education , machine learning , programming CS educators: AI-based developer tools are gunning for your assignments. Resistance is futile. Read more... A Transition for PL Perspectives by Todd Millstein and Roopsha Samanta on Aug 16, 2022 | Today, Todd Millstein hands off the role of co-editor at PL Perspectives to Roopsha Samanta. Read more... PLDI will join PACMPL by Alastair Donaldson on Aug 8, 2022 | Starting with PLDI 2023, the proceedings of PLDI will be published in the PACMPL journal. Read about the community survey that informed the PLDI Steering Committee before they voted for this change. Read more... People of PL: Special Mentoring Edition by John Wickerson on Jun 13, 2022 | Tags: community , mentoring SIGPLAN-M is SIGPLAN’s international long-term mentoring program. Initiated in late 2020 by Talia Ringer, it now has over 200 mentors and over 300 mentees. Everybody in the community — from aspiring undergraduate to experienced faculty — is welcome to take part either as a mentor or as a mentee (or both). For this edition of People of PL, John Wickerson met three of SIGPLAN-M’s mentors to find out about their experiences. Read more... Survey: Should PLDI join PACM-PL? by The PLDI Steering Committee on Jun 10, 2022 | Tags: PACM-PL , PLDI , survey Should the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) publish its proceedings in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (PACM-PL) journal? Please fill out this short survey to help us decide. Read more... Language Design in the Real World by Roman Elizarov on May 19, 2022 | Tags: compilers , kotlin , language design , programming languages Real programming languages are living things, changing and evolving. As with any production code, most of their designer’s time is spent on bug fixing and small improvements, rather than on the radical new features. One of the unique things about Kotlin is that it has been evolving in the use-case and community-driven fashion for years, starting way before it went to the stable 1.0 release in 2016, even for some time before it went public in 2011. Language design in the real world is a maintenance of a complex system and it runs into novel research questions with respect to type systems, feature interactions, usability, real-life code patterns in big code, etc. Read more... « Older Entries Contribute Editors : Adrian Sampson and Aws Albarghouthi Contribute to the Blog Recent Posts AI Software Should be More Like Plain Old Software Teaching Category Theory to Computer Scientists From Research Prototypes to Continuous Integration: Guiding the Design and Implementation of JavaScript Hybrid SPLASH 2021 Retrospective Coping with Copilot Archives April 2024 April 2023 January 2023 August 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 Tags AI safety architecture awards carbon footprint carbon offset climate change compilers computer security concurrency conferences covid-19 diversity formal reasoning formal verification functional programming fuzzing gradual typing hardware history industrial adoption language design machine learning Measurements mentoring MIP award neural networks open access optimization parallelism program analysis programming program synthesis proof engineering publication process quantum computing research research highlights runtimes security static analysis systems testing type systems unconventional computing virtual conferences Categories Categories Select Category Announcement (16) Biography (1) Education (11) Interview (8) People (6) Process (22) Programming (16) Research (70) Retrospective (9) Uncategorized (11) Viewpoint (22) Subscribe via E-Mail ACM SIGPLAN The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) explores programming language concepts and tools, focusing on design, implementation, practice, and theory. Its members are programming language developers, educators, implementers, researchers, theoreticians, and users. Join Us Keep up-to-date with the latest technical developments, network with colleagues outside your workplace and get cutting-edge information, focused resources and...