Built to Last 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 there are plenty of new COBOL
Tackling the Awkward Squad for Reactive Programming 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 represented by a dependency graph, which is used to automatically (re)compute parts of a program whenever its input changes. In practice reactive programming can only be used
The Simple Essence of Algebraic Subtyping Principal Type Inference with Subtyping Made Easy 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 of biunification is difficult to understand, relying on the new concepts of
HOMER Provable Exploration in Reinforcement Learning Last week at ICML 2020, Mikael Henaff, Akshay Krishnamurthy, John Langford and I had a paper on a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that solves three key problems in RL: (i) global exploration, (ii) decoding latent dynamics, and (iii) optimizing a given reward function. Our ICML poster is here. The paper is a bit mathematically
The end of the Redis adventure When I started the Redis project more than ten years ago I was in one of the most exciting moments of my career. My co-founder and I had successfully launched two of the major web 2.0 services of the Italian web. In order to make them scalable we had to
Redis 600 GA is out Finally Redis 6.0.0 stable is out. This time it was a relatively short cycle between the release of the first release candidate and the final release of a stable version. It took about four months, that is not a small amount of time, but is not a lot compared to
Critical issues in digital contract tracing I spent the last month becoming a connoisseur of digital contact tracing approaches since this seems like something where I might be able to help. Many other people have been thinking along similar lines (great), but I also see several misconceptions that even smart and deeply involved people are making.
Applications of Blockchain to Programming Language Theory 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 developer
What is the most effective policy response to the new coronavirus pandemic Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist, but there is an interesting potentially important pattern in the data that seems worth understanding. World healthcare authorities appear to be primarily shifting towards Social Distancing. However, there is potential to pursue a different strategy in the medium term that exploits a vulnerability of
Coronavirus and Machine Learning Conferences I’ve been following the renamed COVID-19 epidemic closely since potential exponentials deserve that kind of attention. The last few days have convinced me it’s a good idea to start making contingency plans for machine learning conferences like ICML. The plausible options happen to be structurally aligned with calls to enable