Archive for Programming languages

Two for one

January 14, 2008 at 1:36 am · Filed under Computer science, Programming languages

Another quick post, lest you think all I do is run. I am also a graduate student, and recently I had a paper accepted into MSPC 2008. The idea was a little project we worked on over the summer, and we didn’t know how to proceed with it. My friend suggested this workshop, which turned out to be perfect. We plan to submit a full paper on the topic for OOPSLA 2009; we’ll see how that turns out. The reviews were all very positive, and I hope we get some good discussion at MSPC that we can roll into the full paper.

I would post a link to the paper, but (a) the final version won’t be ready until the end of the month, and (b) then you anonymous Internet people would know who I was! If you do know who I am, then search for my name on Google, click on my homepage at my university, and it’ll be there under my publications at the end of the month.

The other thing about this is that I get to go to Seattle in March! I’m excited because I’ve never been to the Northwest, and I hear they have excellent beer there.

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iComment: Finding bugs by parsing comments in code

October 26, 2007 at 11:08 am · Filed under Programming languages

I was at OOPSLA this week, and people were talking about a paper from this year’s SOSP. They applied natural language processing to the comments in code and compared what the comments said to how the program actually worked. If there was a mismatch, they considered that a bug. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds incredibly cool.

Here’s the link:
/* iComment: Bugs or Bad Comments? */

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Grand challenges

June 15, 2007 at 2:00 pm · Filed under Programming languages

Bob Colwell gave a great talk at FCRC on Tuesday night. A large part of it focused on the big challenges facing computer architecture in the next few years: multicores and parallelism, thermal issues, and process constraints. But he also talked about the bigger picture, why fewer and fewer students are going into computer science. He made a great point — we don’t have any grand challenges. A recent panel had come up with “parallel programming” as our grand challenge, but seriously, who aside from computer scientists really cares about that? A grand challenge should spark interest from normal people and should be something that really makes people want to work in our field.

I think a great grand challenge is AI. Not AI in the computer science sense of searching and planning and such, but AI in the Turing test sense — an intelligent machine. Clearly the public loves this idea; it comes up all over movies and literature. Do we know how to do it? Not at all, but maybe that’s the point of a grand challenge. A pie-in-the-sky idea that inspires innovation.

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“Goto considered harmful”

February 26, 2007 at 4:56 pm · Filed under Programming languages

I never post about my work on this blog, but I thought that maybe I would start. I do research in garbage collection on a Java platform. This is under the broader umbrella of compilers and programming language research. I thought I might post links to articles and papers that I find interesting.

This is a classic letter from Edsger Dijkstra regarding the goto construct in programming languages. Today, using gotos is considered to be poor style, but I guess this was not so in Dijkstra’s day. Today the “considered harmful” phrase is often used in paper titles as a reference to Dijkstra’s original letter. The phrase even has its own Wikipedia entry.

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