At Scala Matsuri a few weeks ago (incidentally, an excellent conference), I was fortunate to be able to attend Jonas Bonér’s impassioned talk about resilience and reactive software. His theme: “without resilience, nothing else mattersâ€. At the core of it is a certain way of thinking about the ways that complex systems fail. Importantly, complex […]
After three very hectic first months of 2012, the final version of my Ph.D. thesis has been submitted and I’ve gone through the graduation ceremonies. From the 1st of April I will be a postdoctoral associate in bioinformatics at the National Institute of Biomedical Innovation in Osaka, Japan. I will comment further on my Ph.D. […]
I’m in Portland, Oregon for the SPLASH conference. There’s a lot of energy and good ideas going around. I gave a talk about my project, Poplar, at the FREECO workshop. At the same workshop there was a very interesting talk given by Klaus Ostermann, outlining some of the various challenges facing software composition. He linked […]
New programming languages are released all the time. History is littered with dead ones. There are also many long time survivors in good shape, as well as geriatric languages on life support. What makes a programming language attractive and competitive? How can we evaluate its quality? There are many different aspects of this problem. Ease […]
It is likely that few features cause as much problems as pointers and references in statement-oriented languages, such as C, C++ and Java. They are powerful, yes, and they allow us to control quite precisely how a program is to represent something. We can use them to conveniently compose objects and data without the redundancy […]