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 a group of people in a room all speaking different languages (French, Chinese, English, Indonesian, Russian) but trying to work together to display an online banking web site. No wonder it crashes or Russian Hackers come in and steal $1B from a US bank (as happened a few days ago). Wyvern, named after a Welsh dragon, is a programming language "to rule them all".

We created a Wyvern language that "builds the Tower of Babel" and allows instant translation from/to a plethora of programming languages used for the web (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL). This award winning approach makes it possible to guarantee safety and security in a modern online world.

Every time your kids browse Minecraft videos on YouTube, you check your KiwiSaver or mortgage balance, you fly on a plane from Wellington to Auckland, or publish your new article online - its the programming languages research that makes it all possible, secure and reliable.