Category Archives: Dynamic languages

by | July 24, 2018 · 1:00 pm

Teaching Programming Languages

I often have the pleasure of teaching UMD CS‘s undergraduate programming languages course, CMSC 330. Taken by every sophomore in our program, it has evolved into a pretty interesting course, and I find myself talking about it with various people I meet. As such, I thought it might be worth writing down what it’s about, in case others might also find the course (or elements of it) interesting or its materials useful. (Most of the course’s materials — lecture notes, projects, exams, homeworks — are freely available at the course homepage.) There is too much to say for one post, so I’ll break it into three parts. This post covers the overview and first 1/2 of the course, and the second post will cover the third quarter, and the last post will cover the last quarter while also making some broader connections.

Programming languages bubble chart

Programming languages galore!

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Filed under Dynamic languages, Education, Functional programming

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by | March 24, 2016 · 1:00 pm

Interview with Matt Might

This post presents an interview I did on March 10th, 2015, with Matt Might, a PL researcher who is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah.

Matt Might headshot

Matt Might

Matt has made strong scientific contributions to the field of programming languages, and he has done much more. He maintains an incredibly popular blog on wide-ranging topics (13 million pageviews since 2009 on topics from abstract interpretation to how to lose weight to how to be more productive). He has also become deeply committed to supporting people with rare diseases, including his own son, Bertrand, who was the first person diagnosed with NGLY1 deficiency. His work on rare disease propelled him to the White House: He met the President on January 31st, 2015, and he took a position in the Executive Office of the President to accelerate the implementation of the Precision Medicine Initiative on March 21st.

We had an engaging conversation covering all of these topics. It is too long for one post, so this post is the first of two. Continue reading →

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Filed under Abstract interpretation, Bioinformatics, Dynamic languages, Interviews, Program Analysis, Science, Scientists

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by | August 5, 2014 · 7:15 am

What is type safety?

In response to my previous post defining memory safety (for C), one commenter suggested it would be nice to have a post explaining type safety. Type safety is pretty well understood, but it’s still not something you can easily pin down. In particular, when someone says, “Java is a type-safe language,” what do they mean, exactly? Are all type-safe languages “the same” in some way? What is type safety getting you, for particular languages, and in general?

In fact, what type safety means depends on language type system’s definition. In the simplest case, type safety ensures that program behaviors are well defined. More generally, as I discuss in this post, a language’s type system can be a powerful tool for reasoning about the correctness and security of its programs, and as such the development of novel type systems is a rich area of research.

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Filed under Dynamic languages, PL in practice, Semantics, Software Security, Types

by | July 24, 2014 · 6:46 am

Spotlight: Ravi Chugh

This post continues our ongoing series on young PL researchers who are about to start independent research positions in academia and research labs. This week, we  feature Ravi Chugh, who is starting as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago in the Fall. Continue reading →

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Filed under Dynamic languages, Interviews, New scientists, Types