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ICFP 2014 Notes, Day 3
Sep. 23rd, 2014 09:14 amThese notes are about Wednesday, September 3.
The first talk I went to was Carlo Angiuli's talk on homotopical patch theory. I understood very little about the actual new work in the talk, but I'm very glad to finally have at least a vague sense of what homotopy type theory is about (though I no longer remember how much of that came from the talk, and how much came from talking to Carlo and to Ed Kmett the day before :) I was about to write down my hand-wavy summary of what I think it's about, but I realized it's too hand-wavy to even write down. But, I want to read more about it, and if you're curious, so can you!
The next talk I went to was Niki Vazou's talk on refinement types for Haskell. Refinement types are cool, but sadly, I lost the thread (totally my fault in this case) somewhere after Vazou said something about using refinement types to prove termination for themselves. At that point, I wrote down an outraged little comment on my notepad that ended with a note to myself to read the paper. The other thing about this talk that I noted, which I hate to mention -- but really, what I hate is that it's even noteworthy at all -- is that during the Q&A period, a woman asked a question at a talk given by a different woman. This was the 10th ICFP I've attended, and I'm pretty sure this was the first time I've seen that happen at ICFP.
Then I missed most of Conor McBride's talk "How To Keep Your Neighbors in order" indirectly due to listening to Ed tell his (edited, I'm sure) life story. If you get the chance, you should ask Ed his life story; he may be the closest person to a character in a Hunter S. Thompson book who you're likely to meet at a computer science conference.
Next (for me) was Simon Marlow's talk "There is no Fork: an Abstraction for Efficient, Concurrent, and Concise Data Access", which was probably the best talk title of ICFP 2014. Simon talked about his work on Haxl, motivated by wanting an implicitly concurrent language for fetching data incrementally and lazily. This reminded me a bit of what I overheard when I was working on Rust about Servo's incremental layout, but I don't remember it well enough to know if that's a red herring or not. I'll be interested to read the paper and see if there's any comparison with Erlang, as well.
Jeremy Gibbons began his talk "Folding Domain-Specific Languages: Deep and Shallow Embeddings by saying that his co-author Nicolas Wu couldn't be there because "he has taken delivery of a new baby". Which was funny, but possibly took someone else out of the picture a bit ;) The talk was helpful to me since I spent four years at Portland State hearing people talking about deep and shallow embeddings without knowing what that meant, and now I do. Deep embeddings are syntax-driven and shallow embeddings are semantics-driven (unless it's the opposite); in a shallow embedding, operations are functions in the host language and in a deep embedding, operations are types in the host language (ditto). It's a similar dichotomy to the expression problem. I wrote in my notes "Somehow you can turn context-sensitive interpretations into compositional ones (read the paper)". At that point, I was literally too tired to stand up, so I'm just pleased with myself for having remembered this much!
The first talk I went to was Carlo Angiuli's talk on homotopical patch theory. I understood very little about the actual new work in the talk, but I'm very glad to finally have at least a vague sense of what homotopy type theory is about (though I no longer remember how much of that came from the talk, and how much came from talking to Carlo and to Ed Kmett the day before :) I was about to write down my hand-wavy summary of what I think it's about, but I realized it's too hand-wavy to even write down. But, I want to read more about it, and if you're curious, so can you!
The next talk I went to was Niki Vazou's talk on refinement types for Haskell. Refinement types are cool, but sadly, I lost the thread (totally my fault in this case) somewhere after Vazou said something about using refinement types to prove termination for themselves. At that point, I wrote down an outraged little comment on my notepad that ended with a note to myself to read the paper. The other thing about this talk that I noted, which I hate to mention -- but really, what I hate is that it's even noteworthy at all -- is that during the Q&A period, a woman asked a question at a talk given by a different woman. This was the 10th ICFP I've attended, and I'm pretty sure this was the first time I've seen that happen at ICFP.
Then I missed most of Conor McBride's talk "How To Keep Your Neighbors in order" indirectly due to listening to Ed tell his (edited, I'm sure) life story. If you get the chance, you should ask Ed his life story; he may be the closest person to a character in a Hunter S. Thompson book who you're likely to meet at a computer science conference.
Next (for me) was Simon Marlow's talk "There is no Fork: an Abstraction for Efficient, Concurrent, and Concise Data Access", which was probably the best talk title of ICFP 2014. Simon talked about his work on Haxl, motivated by wanting an implicitly concurrent language for fetching data incrementally and lazily. This reminded me a bit of what I overheard when I was working on Rust about Servo's incremental layout, but I don't remember it well enough to know if that's a red herring or not. I'll be interested to read the paper and see if there's any comparison with Erlang, as well.
Jeremy Gibbons began his talk "Folding Domain-Specific Languages: Deep and Shallow Embeddings by saying that his co-author Nicolas Wu couldn't be there because "he has taken delivery of a new baby". Which was funny, but possibly took someone else out of the picture a bit ;) The talk was helpful to me since I spent four years at Portland State hearing people talking about deep and shallow embeddings without knowing what that meant, and now I do. Deep embeddings are syntax-driven and shallow embeddings are semantics-driven (unless it's the opposite); in a shallow embedding, operations are functions in the host language and in a deep embedding, operations are types in the host language (ditto). It's a similar dichotomy to the expression problem. I wrote in my notes "Somehow you can turn context-sensitive interpretations into compositional ones (read the paper)". At that point, I was literally too tired to stand up, so I'm just pleased with myself for having remembered this much!