BayFP Talk with Philip Wadler
January 7, 2008 | Be the first to comment
This month’s BayFP meeting is Wednesday, January 9th. We’re fortunate to be overlapping POPL 2008, and have arranged for Philip Wadler to repeat a talk on “Well typed programs can’t be blamed“. The talk will be held at 7:30pm in the Nob Hill Room at The Stanford Court Hotel, San Francisco.
This joint paper with Robby Findler introduces blame — from contracts — to a type system with casts. The authors then show that any failure of a cast from a dynamically-typed term to a well-typed context must be blamed on the dynamically typed term (they call this positive blame). Similarly, any cast from a more-precisely-typed term to a less-precisely-typed context must be blamed on the less-precisely-typed context (negative blame). Thus, the title of the talk: well-typed programs can’t be blamed.
The paper concludes with the observation that programming languages with libraries, development tools, user communities and other network effects often get adopted faster regardless of technical superiority. The authors propose that integrating dynamic and static typing into a single language may form a better basis for comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each.
This talk is not just for type theorists and functional programming enthusiasts; many professional programmers work with both static and dynamic types every day. As the authors point out, Visual Basic already supports both static and dynamic typing, and similar integration is planned for Perl 6 and Javascript. One way or another, if you program for a living then you’re probably already switching between the designs, although usually not within a single language.
Several of us from Skydeck will be there on Wednesday and we’d love to see you there. The talk is free, even though it’s being held in the same hotel as the ACM conference. Speaking of the conference, drop us a line if you’ll be in San Francisco for it. Some of us will be attending affiliated events earlier in the week.
Posted by: Mike
Categories: Technology, Programming
