An important function of science fiction is to help us understand sociological, technological, and other aspects of our future. A really good SF novel — like some of those produced by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin, Niven, and Vinge — is so full of ideas and possibilities that the reader’s mind is expanded a little. [...]
Notes: This piece is mainly about compilers used for safety-critical or otherwise-critical systems. The intersection of formal methods and compilers for scripting languages is the empty set. Readers may be interested in a companion piece The Future of Compiler Optimization. A half-century of experience in developing compilers has not resulted in a body of widely-used [...]
Also see The Future of Compiler Correctness. Compiler optimizations are great: developers can write intuitive code in high-level languages, and still have them execute in a reasonably fast way. On the other hand, progress in optimization research is excruciatingly slow despite hundreds of papers being published on the topic every year. Proebsting’s Law speculates that [...]
The premises are simple. First, energy consumption must be met by energy production. Second, use of fossil fuels is unsustainable. Third, no magical technological fix to the energy problem is going to arrive. Finally, to understand a sustainable future, we must think quantitatively. That is, to proceed with a debate about, for example, wind or [...]
As a recipient of research funding from the US government, I sometimes think about how this resource should be allocated. Wikipedia claims that for most developed countries, research funding amounts to 1.5% to 3% of GDP, so we are talking about a lot of money here. Appropriate focusing of this funding can change the world [...]