Toronto-based reading group that meets weekly to read computer science books and papers.
Currently reading: The Little Typer
Hi Everyone! Thanks for another great session, where we went over Milner’s algorithm J and finished off the last sections of the paper. We followed that up by discussing the 3 questions I had left for everyone last week.
The group is now taking a 1 week hiatus while Dann is off presenting his work on visualizing computer processes in Florida (go Dann!), but we will be back with a vengeance in 2 weeks. Meeting at 6:30pm, Friday June 5th at Bento Miso to cover Philip Wadler’s forthcoming article, Propositions as types (http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/propositions-as-types/propositions-as-types.pdf). Sorry Ben!
Maybe it’s just the amount of time we’ve now spent reading Milner, but I left Friday feeling like Algorithm J made sense to me, which felt unusual indeed :). Some of Pete’s explanations really helped clarify it for me in particular, thanks Pete! During the discussion, Chris brought up a famous quote from Milner, “Types are the leaven of computer programming: they make it digestible” and the more I think about it the more apt it seems. Although unleavened bread goes great with chicken tikka kabobs so maybe there is something to be said for flavour. Perhaps of interest, I found these slides from Pierce that start with Milner’s quote and give his take on Milner’s types, http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/TypesALaMilner.pdf.
After a short celebration we discussed developing programs in typed and untyped languages at great length and I found a lot of very interesting and revealing anecdotes in what everyone said. I think we covered a lot of important design considerations, practical and theoretical contrasting typed and untyped languages. I don’t know precisely how we will use this information just yet, but it seems useful so rather than try to summarize, I just tried to remember as best as I could what everyone said and added everything to a wiki page in github, https://github.com/CompSciCabal/SMRTYPRTY/wiki/Discussion!-Practical-Aspects-of-Types. I encourage you to go take a look and correct my numerous omissions and glaring errors.
Enjoy the break, see you all back in June, Scott?