At JAOO

I'm at JAOO. Overall quite a positively surprising experience. Much less business-lingo and far more fairly advanced conceptual and abstract stuff than I had expected. I knew that keynotes by Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell-father) and talks by Don Syme (the man behind F#) would be good.

But I was positively thrilled by some of the topics discussed and some of the discussions we got into on the day with the concurrency-track. Rich Hickey and the idioms he'd put into his Clojure-language really utilized some knowledge and nailed down some programming idioms for concurrency - in a much more useable manner - than what I've been used to seeing at academic conferences. Yes - it's hard; yes - threads and locks are a terribly bare-bones model to work with concurrency; yes - you really need to use immutable state. He essentially isolated four gradually more advanced forms of concurrency: An atom - essentially a cell, where you are given a synchronous read-and-set operation to work with it; a var - a persistent reference to a value that might change but is isolated inside a thread; a ref - a mutable storage location, which allows synchronous access, but only through transactions (segue to buzzword-compliant software transactional memory); and, agents which provide asynchronous access to mutable state. These idioms are available via fairly simple built-in keywords - inside a LISP-variant language (which is ok, but not reeeally to my liking, I'm more an ML/Haskell-kind-of-guy).

As Rich Hickey is not in academia - but develops programs for real customers, he needs to make these things actually work. He's chosen - wisely, I think - to target virtual machines. Building on top of custom Java libraries and compiling to bytecode running on the JVM, but also - via collaborators - aiming to target the CLR. This was so refreshing. He'd essentially made this language, because - as a consultant - he was extremely tired of developing concurrent programs in languages like Java, C++, and C#. How alien to an old fallen academic like myself. Actually having a problem before looking for a solution!

Ah - gotta run now. But in passing, I should mention also that I have - I promise myself this time (for the 5th time) - to go check out Erlang.
The guest from Erlang - Ulf Wiger - essentially shut up all the other participants on the Concurrency discussion panel, when he dryly remarked that Erlang-people had trouble comprehending concurrent programs running hundreds of threads; they were used to programs running hundreds of thousands of threads...

Ph.D.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah....

'Nuff said.

Energy

These fine gentlemen (The Mars Volta) are fairly energetic. Exactly the opposite of how I feel. I would care to wager that they do drugs.



And here is a version with better sound. Though it lacks the live feeeel, that I so diiig. (My apologies. As is well-known, it is obligatory to use at least one slang-expression, when discussing musicians with helmet-hair.)

Mandatory cutesy baby pics

Here's some cute pics of our little sleepy bear:

How to spend five weeks

Well, well, well. I've been away for a few weeks. I've been busy stuff in the the non-virtual world, not the least preparing for becoming a dad in three weeks.

But well, what do you know - my son decided he couldn't wait, so early Monday morning (3.45 am), I became the proud and somewhat surprised father to a healthy boy! We'd heard that many give birth too late the first time, so we were really caught somewhat surprised. We've just come home from the hospital now - we're extremely happy - but still somewhat puzzled by the events that have pooled up over the last few days. We should probably start by finally selecting a name - he hasn't got one yet, as we thought we had plenty of time to think about that. We also have to buy the last few things, and assemble a lot of stuff. But hey; most importantly, both he and Lena are in fine shape.

I'll try to upload some pictures in the next post.

Now I have to go change a diaper...

How to spend five years

So I just handed in this tiny thing, called a dissertation.

I must admit - it's a nice sensation. It goes a long way towards bringing closure to the ... hmmm ... last ... five years of my life. Five years and bit, in fact. Dammit, that's a long time. I'm getting old.

What did I do(?!), you eagerly shout... without having read the bloody thing? Well, ok - right now my passing-on-the-stairway-version is the following:

I worked with a framework (bigraphs) for domain-specific programming languages (DSLs). I developed some fundamental theory and algorithms that enabled us to implement a prototype tool to play around with such languages. Oh yeah, and then I developed a DSL, the snappily named C calculus (C for cell), that biochemists can use to describe and experiment with cells and proteins in silico. Check out this poster, for some nice pictures:

Quirky?

Sometimes, I worry that my stint in academia has left me quirky and absent-minded. As usual, my beloved brother comes to my aid, by reminding me that these tendencies have nothing to do with my time in academia.

I recently received an email from him, saying (translated):

Subject: 3 things.

(1) I know what to get dad for Christmas.
(2) What do you know about OCR-scanning?
(3) I forgot the third thing.

Stephan