Month: February 2015

  • Adandoned Mineshaft

    Due to my 8-year-old’s obsession with Minecraft, the abandoned mineshafts found in the game are an everyday topic of discussion around the house. He is saving up to buy a pickaxe — no joke. Since we needed a day trip for the long weekend, I thought we’d visit some actual mines in the Silver Island…

  • Instruction Synthesis is Fun and Weird

    Synthesis is sort of a hot topic in PL research lately. It basically means “implement a specification automatically.” Of course, at some level this isn’t very different from what compilers have been doing for ages, if we consider the source language program to be the specification, but when we’re doing synthesis the connotation is that…

  • Static Analysis Benchmarks

    Many programmers would agree that static analysis is pretty awesome: it can find code defects that are very hard to find using testing and walkthroughs. On the other hand, some scientific validation of the effectiveness of static analysis would be useful. For example, this nice 2004 paper found that when five analyzers were turned loose…