In this post I interview Russ Cox and Sameer Ajmani, who work at Google on the Go programming language. They share with me their path to working on the language, what they find unique and valuable about it, and plans for it going ahead.
This continues our series on PhDs in industry working on programming languages (Avik Chaudhuri was the first). Thanks to Russ and Sameer for taking the time to share their experiences!
Filed under Interviews, PL in practice
During my tenure as a student and professor, I have been to many talks offering career advice to graduate students. Most of these talks focus on careers in research universities and industrial research labs, and leave out discussion of institutions, such as liberal arts colleges, that are primarily concerned with undergraduate education. This is unfortunate because many liberal arts colleges are highly selective institutions that offer exciting careers that mix research and teaching, albeit in a different way than careers in research universities.
One way to reduce the information deficit about liberal arts colleges is to report on the experiences of those who work at one. This is what we do in the present post. Specifically, I interview Steve Freund, who is a professor of computer science at Williams College, ranked by US News as the top liberal arts college in America. Steve is a highly successful PL researcher, known for his significant contributions to the analysis of concurrent programs. As a result, he is in a great position to give PL Enthusiast readers a view into what it’s like to be a teacher and researcher at a liberal arts institution. Continue reading
Filed under Education, Interviews, Research
In this post I discuss a program security property called noninterference. I motivate why you might like it if your program satisfied noninterference, and show that the property is fundamental to many areas beyond just security. I also explore some programming languages and tools that might help you enforce noninterference, noting that while tainting analysis won’t get you the whole way there, research tools that attempt to do better have their own problems. I conclude with some suggestions for future research, in particular with the idea that testing noninterference may be a practical approach.
Filed under Program Analysis, Software Security, Types
