Seminar: Principles of Programming Languages

Description

Programming language research is an area of computer science that concerns itself with

• the design of new programming languages, programming language features and programming paradigms to aid developers in writing correct software
• the formal study of programming languages and their properties.
• the design of formal methods and tools to analyze and help understand computer programs.

In this seminar, we will read and discuss papers from particular areas of programming language research:

• Probabilistic Programming
• Logic Programming
• Verification
• Typestate & Linear Types
• Program Synthesis
• Analysis for JavaScript
• Functional Programming

Execution

Each participant chooses a topic from the topic list below. The participants will need to prepare 30 to 40 min presentation about their topic as well as a written summary. We have several dates scheduled for the presentations. We plan to have two presentations per date.

The written summary has to be prepared in LaTeX using the llncs style and should not exceed 15 pages. The deadline for submitting the written summary is four weeks after the date of the corresponding presentation.

Examination

The final grade will be composed of the presentation (40%), the written summary (40%) and overall participation (20%).

Links

• Ras Bodik on Program Synthesis
• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX

List of topics

• Probabilistic Programming
  • Probabilistic Programming (Gordon et al 2014)
  • Probabilistic Programs as Spreadsheet Queries (Gordon et al 2015)
  • A Type Theory for Probability Density Functions (Bhat et al 2012)
  • Uncertain<T>: a first-order type for uncertain data (Bornholt et al 2014)
• Logic Programming
  • The Semantics of Predicate Logic as a Programming Language (Van Emden, Kowalski 1979).
  • Integration of Functional and Logic Programming (Hanus, Kuchen 1996)
• Verification
  • Local Reasoning about Programs that Alter Data Structures (O'Hearn 2001)
• Typestate & Linear Types
  • Foundations of Typestate-Oriented Programming (Garcia et al 2014)
  • Linear type theory for asynchronous session types (Gay, Vasconcelos 2010)
• Program Synthesis
  • Complete completion using types and weights (Gverno et al 2013)
  • Growing Solver-Aided Languages with Rosette (Torlak, Bodik 2013)
  • Constraints as Control (Köksal et al 2012)
  • Falling back on executable specifications (Samimi et al 2010)
• Analysis for JavaScript
  • Stateless Model Checking of Event-Driven Applications (Jensen et al 2015)
  • Jalangi: a selective record-replay and dynamic analysis framework for JavaScript (Sen et al 2013)
  • Concrete Types for TypeScript (Richards et al 2015)
• Functional Programming
  • A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming (Milner 1978)
  • Correct blame for contracts: no more scapegoating (Dimoulas et al 2011)
  • Liquid Types (Rondon et al 2008)
  • Abstract Refinement Types (Vazou et al 2013)

Dates