First steps on the road to reinventing computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: allison () stanford edu
Date: February 14, 2007 1:34:55 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: [EE CS Colloq] First steps on the road to reinventing  
computing * 4:15PM, Wed Feb 14, 2007 in Gates B01
Reply-To: ee380 () shasta stanford edu



             Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

                 4:15PM, Wednesday, Feb 14, 2007
        HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01
                   http://ee380.stanford.edu[1]

       Building your own dynamic language is fun and easy!

Topic:    First steps on the road to reinventing computing

Speaker:  Ian Piumarta
          Viewpoints Research Institute

About the talk:

Viewpoints Research Insitute recently began a five-year project
to reinvent how we program and interact with computers. An early
goal of our work is to make a practical, working mathematical
model of a complete personal computer system that invites
understanding and modification by users at all levels.

An essential part of the model is a programming language and
environment that exhibit the properties desired of the system at
large. In computer science terms, this language and environment
are:

metacircular -- they are sufficiently powerful to implement
themselves with no extrinsic behaviour or other `magic'; and
self-similar -- the essential data abstractions and mechanisms
used to describe the most primitive levels in the implementation
are the same as those presented to the user as the building
blocks of arbitrary computation.

The result is a compact and understandable programming
environment in which nothing is hidden from, or beyond the
influence of, its users.

In this talk I will describe several significant aspects of the
design and implementation of this programming environment. The
foundation is a pair of mutually-supporting abstractions for
behaviour and state. These abstractions are individually very
simple and incapable of completely describing their own
implementation. When combined, however, each abstraction provides
all of the necessary `extrinsic magic' required for the other to
describe itself.

The behavioural abstraction is inspired by McCarthy's rendering
of LISP in LISP. In a half-page description, McCarthy created a
recursive model that was small enough to be easily understandable
and yet sufficiently complete to permit fruitful thinking about
its meaning. In the spirit of McCarthy's LISP I will show how the
abstraction for state in our system is modelled in terms of
objects responding to messages, where the semantics of message
sending are defined recursively in terms of objects responding to
messages.

I will finish by describing of the remaining components of our
programming system (from parsing to code generation) and the
techniques that keep everything open, understandable and
dynamically extensible by the user.

Links to References:

NSF Grant: Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming
http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf[2] An evolving
whitepaper about the "combined object-lambda abstractions"
http://piumarta.com/papers/colas-whitepaper.pdf[3] A small paper
describing just the object model in detail
http://piumarta.com/pepsi/objmodel.pdf[4] Slides:

Download[5] the slides for this presentation in PDF format.

About the speaker:

Ian Piumarta is a computer scientist at Viewpoints Reseach
Institute. He studied at the University of Manchester (UK) where
he was awarded a B.Sc. followed by a Ph.D. for work on code
generation techniques. After a couple of years as a post-doc at
Manchester he moved to Paris to work at IRCAM. He then spent ten
years working at INRIA and the University of Paris VI before
moving to the United States and taking his current position at
Viewpoints. He spends most of his time thinking about and
implementing technologies for making computer languages more
open, reflexive, dynamically self-describing and understandable.
The rest of his time he spends listening to music, playing Bach
on the guitar, building hi-fi equipment and flying airplanes.

Contact information:

Ian Piumarta
Viewpoints Research Institute
1209 Grand Central Ave
Glendale, CA
818 332 3001
ian () squeakland org[6]


Embedded Links:
[ 1 ]    http://ee380.stanford.edu
[ 2 ]    http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf
[ 3 ]    http://piumarta.com/papers/colas-whitepaper.pdf
[ 4 ]    http://piumarta.com/pepsi/objmodel.pdf
[ 5 ]    http://piumarta.com/papers/EE380-2007-slides.pdf
[ 6 ]    mailto:ian () squeakland org


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