Category Archives: Language adoption

by | March 31, 2016 · 1:00 pm

Interview with Matt Might, Part 2

Matt Might at the White House, Jan 2015

Matt at the White House, Jan 2015

This post is the second part of my March 10th interview of Matt Might, a PL researcher and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Utah.

In Part I, we talked about Matt’s academic background, his PL research (including his favorite among the papers he’s written), and his work on understanding and treating rare disease, which began with the quest to diagnose his son Bertrand, and has led to a role in the President’s Initiative on Precision Medicine.

In this post, our conversation continues, covering the topics of blogging, privacy, managing a crazy schedule, and looking ahead to promising PL research directions. Continue reading →

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Filed under Bioinformatics, Interviews, Language adoption, Probabilistic programming, Program Analysis, Scientists, Software Security, Types

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by | September 2, 2014 · 8:40 am

Who teaches functional programming?

A couple of months ago, we posted about the research program of SocioPLT, whose goal is to study why some languages get adopted more than others. As part of a study, the investigators ranked languages according to their frequency of use in Sourceforge projects during the period 2000-2010. An interesting finding was that among the top 20 languages in these rankings, there wasn’t even one functional language.

Academic PL researchers tend to love functional programming, so many of us would find this fact depressing. However, it seems that we academics are at least partly to blame for this state of affairs. For functional programming to be embraced in the “real world”, universities must teach it. In this post, I show that few universities do. In particular, functional programming is a significant part of the core programming sequence at only 9 of the top 33 American schools, and is not offered at all in about 40% of these schools.  Continue reading →

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Filed under Education, Language adoption

by | July 9, 2014 · 1:02 pm

Why are some languages adopted and others aren’t?

In my last article I discussed how the failure to find the Heartbleed bug sooner was in some sense a failure to refine or deploy what is otherwise effective technology for static analysis. In particular, commercial static analysis tools purposely will ignore potential bugs so as to avoid reporting too many false alarms, i.e., favoring completeness over soundness. The companies that make these tools aim to provide a profitable service to a broad market, and their own investigations indicate soundness is not important for sales. Instead, to be viable, tools must help developers find real, important bugs efficiently, and not necessarily every bug. A challenge to researchers is to find ways to push the business proposition back toward soundness while retaining efficiency (and other desirable criteria); Andy Chou’s POPL’14 keynote outlines other useful challenges.

While Heartbleed is ostensibly about the adoption and improvement of static analysis, in this article I explore the related question of fostering the adoption of programming languages. I summarize impressive research by Leo Meyerovich and Ariel Rabkin on adoption research questions and adoption practices that appeared at OOPSLA’12 and OOPSLA’13, respectively. I think there are some interesting results here, with implications for improving the adoption of languages. Their results also raise new questions for further research (but too late for yesterday’s POPL deadline — good luck to all submitters!).

Continue reading →

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Filed under Language adoption, PL in practice

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