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Showing posts from February, 2015

Ownership versus Information Flow

In a recent discussion I had a question came up about how there is work on Ownership (protecting the object's representation) versus Information Flow ( Jif is an example that often comes to mind and its about protecting the values or information stored inside objects). Basically, the ownership people care about what happens to the references to the object that is marked as private . It is extremely important not to allow "aliases" or references from outside the owner to refer to the private object and thus be able to change it unexpectedly. It is not so important as to what value the object stores as its perfectly fine for a private password to be stored in an owned (and thus private) field but then copied at a primitive character level to a public field and then passed around until it is inside another object and copied into a private, owned field there. In fact - that is the only way to make a lot of common programming patters like iterators work in a proper ownershi

Writing for Intelligent 12 Year Olds

One of the takeaway lessons when taking to the media is the popular concept of "writing for a 12 year old". When we advise our graduate students to do presentations to the industry we ask them to aim at a "typical Computer Science final year undergraduate". But when you want your audience to be the normal people on the street its a completely different ball game. Some publications even try to make sure their language is acceptable for a "reading age of 8". This basically means the person is smart but doesn't have the specific terminology that you take for granted. Here is my attempt to explain the Wyvern Type Directed Parsing approach we covered in our Safely Composable Type-Specific Languages paper in the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) 2014. I am aiming to be extremely terse (less than a minute if reading out loud) and also aiming to capture the readers attention and promote programming languages research. ;-) Imagine

Science Media SAVVY

I have attended the Science Media SAVVY Workshop over the past couple of days ran by Science Media Centre and funded by MBIE. It was a great experience and connected us with many journalists from TV, Radio, Newspaper, and Magazine media. As a result, I decided to return to blogging, aiming to cover mostly programming languages and in particular Wyvern related issues. This received limited attention in the media last year because of media releases and technical media coverage with occasional humorous angle .