If you are in the world of programming languages research, the announcement that UW had hired Ras Bodik away from Berkeley was big news. Quoting UW’s announcement:
Ras’s arrival creates a truly world-class programming languages group in UW CSE that crosses into systems, databases, security, architecture, and other areas. Ras joins recent hires Emina Torlak,[ref]We previously interviewed Emina on this blog.[/ref] Alvin Cheung, Xi Wang, and Zach Tatlock, and senior faculty members Dan Grossman and Mike Ernst.
And there’s also Luis Ceze, a regular publisher at PLDI, who ought to be considered as part of this group. With him, UW CSE has 8 out of 54 faculty with strong ties to PL. Hiring five PL-oriented faculty in three years, thus making PL a significant fraction of the faculty’s expertise, is (highly) atypical. What motivated UW CSE in its decision-making? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they see that PL-oriented researchers are making huge inroads on important problems, bringing a useful perspective to unlock new results.
In this post, I argue why studying PL (for your PhD, Masters, or just for fun) can be interesting and rewarding, both because of what you will learn, and because of the increasing opportunities that are available, e.g., in terms of impactful research topics and funding for them.