The idea of Platonic C# is to enforce referential transparency within the context of C#, by enforcing a set of rules around defaulting to immutability of data structures and requiring uniqueness of instances of mutable types.

The Computer History Museum, in conjunction with Adobe, has released the PostScript source code. Here is the release, with some helpful historical context and several photos: The story of PostScript has many different facets. It is a story about profound changes in human literacy as well as a story ...

The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/verse-conf.pdf LENNART AUGUSTSSON, Epic Games, Sweden JOACHIM BREITNER KOEN CLAESSEN, Epic Games, Sweden RANJIT JHALA, Epic Games, USA SIMON PEYTON JONES, Epic Games, United Kingdom OLIN SH...

LtU has experienced a long period of downtime recently. Its software infrastructure was outdated enough that it became difficult to maintain when problems arose. It has now been migrated to a brand new environment. It should be much more stable from now on.

In 2019, Graydon Hoare gave a talk to undergraduates (PDF of slides) trying to communicate a sense of what compilers looked like from the perspective of people who did it for a living. I've been aware of this talk for over a year and meant to submit a story here, but was overcome by the sheer number...

Latent Effects for Reusable Language Components, by Birthe van den Berg, Tom Schrijvers, Casper Bach Poulsen, Nicolas Wu: The development of programming languages can be quite complicated and costly. Hence, much effort has been devoted to the modular definition of language features that can be reuse...

Introducing PathQuery, Google's Graph Query Language We introduce PathQuery, a graph query language developed to scale with Google's query and data volumes as well as its internal developer community. PathQuery supports flexible and declarative semantics. We have found that this enables query develo...

You can read more about it at the Google Open Source blog post, Logica: organizing your data queries, making them universally reusable and fun. They advocate for datalog-like language they developed internally at Google. The reason? Good programming is about creating small, understandable, reusable ...

From the Coq-club: The Coq development team acknowledges the recent discussions (started on the Coq-Club mailing list) around Coq's logo and name. We wish to thank everyone that participated in these discussions. Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations, reports about...

Post by Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones on LAMBDA giving Excel users the ability to define functions. Ever since it was released in the 1980s, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the millions of people who u...

Google's AI division, Google Brain, has two main products for deep learning: TensorFlow and Jax. While TensorFlow is best known, Jax can be thought of as a higher-level language for specifying deep learning algorithms while automatically eliding code that doesn't need to run as part of the model. Ja...

Mar Hicks. Built to Last. Logic. Issue 11, "Care". It was this austerity-driven lack of investment in people—rather than the handy fiction, peddled by state governments, that programmers with obsolete skills retired—that removed COBOL programmers years before this recent crisis. The reality is that ...

https://2020.ecoop.org/details/ecoop-2020-papers/19/Tackling-the-Awkward-Squad-for-Reactive-Programming-The-Actor-Reactor-Model Sam Van den Vonder, Thierry Renaux, Bjarno Oeyen, Joeri De Koster, Wolfgang De Meuter Reactive programming is a programming paradigm whereby programs are internally represe...

The Simple Essence of Algebraic Subtyping: Principal Type Inference with Subtyping Made Easy, Lionel Parreaux, ICFP 2020. MLsub extends traditional Hindley-Milner type inference with subtyping while preserving compact principal types, an exciting new development. However, its specification in terms ...

Let's talk about Blockchain. Goal is to use this forum topic to highlight its usefulness to programming language theory and practice. If you're familiar with existing research efforts, please share them here. In addition, feel free to generate ideas for how Blockchain could improve languages and dev...