## OPLSS 2015 Announcement

February 20, 2015

We are pleased to announce the preliminary program for the 14th Annual Oregon Programming Languages Summer School (OPLSS) to be held June 15th to 27th, 2015 at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

This year’s program is titled Types, Logic, Semantics, and Verification and features the following speakers:

• Amal Ahmed, Northeastern University
• Nick Benton, Microsoft Cambridge Research Lab
• Adam Chlipala, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Robert Constable, Cornell University
• Peter Dybjer, Chalmers University of Technology
• Robert Harper, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ed Morehouse, Carnegie Mellon University
• Greg Morrisett, Harvard University
• Frank Pfenning, Carnegie Mellon University

The registration deadline is March 16, 2015.

Full information on registration and scholarships is available at https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/.

Best regards from the OPLSS 2015 organizers!

Robert Harper

Greg Morrisett

Zena Ariola



## Summer of Programming Languages

July 6, 2014

Having just returned from the annual Oregon Programming Languages Summer School, at which I teach every year, I am once again very impressed with the impressive growth in the technical sophistication of the field and with its ability to attract brilliant young students whose enthusiasm and idealism are inspiring.  Eugene was, as ever, an ideal setting for the summer school, providing a gorgeous setting for work and relaxation.  I was particularly glad for the numerous chances to talk with students outside of the classroom, usually over beer, and I enjoyed, as usual, the superb cycling conditions in Eugene and the surrounding countryside.  Many students commented to me that the atmosphere at the summer school is wonderful, filled with people who are passionate about programming languages research, and suffused with a spirit of cooperation and sharing of ideas.

Started by Zena Ariola a dozen years ago, this year’s instance was organized by Greg Morrisett and Amal Ahmed in consultation with Zena.  As usual, the success of the school depended critically on the dedication of Jim Allen, who has been the de facto chief operating officer since it’s inception.  Without Jim, OPLSS could not exist.  His attention to detail, and his engagement with the students are legendary.   Support from the National Science Foundation CISE Division, ACM SIGPLANMicrosoft Research, Jane Street Capital, and BAE Systems was essential for providing an excellent venue,  for supporting a roster of first-rate lecturers, and for supporting the participation of students who might otherwise not have been able to attend.  And, of course, an outstanding roster of lecturers donated their time to come to Eugene for a week to share their ideas with the students and their fellow lecturers.

The schedule of lectures is posted on the web site, all of which were taped, and are made available on the web.  In addition many speakers provided course notes, software, and other backing materials that are also available online.  So even if you were not able to attend, you can still benefit from the summer school, and perhaps feel more motivated to come next summer.  Greg and I will be organizing, in consultation with Zena.  Applying the principle “don’t fix what isn’t broken”, we do not anticipate major changes, but there is always room for improvement and the need to freshen up the content every year.  For me the central idea of the summer school is the applicability of deep theory to everyday practice.  Long a dream held by researchers such as me, these connections become more “real” every year as the theoretical abstractions of yesterday become the concrete practices of today.  It’s breathtaking to see how far we’ve come from the days when I was a student just beginning to grasp the opportunities afforded by ideas from proof theory, type theory, and category theory (the Holy Trinity) to building beautiful software systems.  No longer the abstruse fantasies of mad (computer) scientists, these ideas are the very air we breathe in PL research.  Gone are the days of ad hoc language designs done in innocence of the foundations on which they rest.  Nowadays serious industrial-strength languages are emerging that are grounded in theory and informed by practice.

Two examples have arisen just this summer, Rust (from Mozila) and Swift (from Apple), that exemplify the trend.  Although I have not had time to study them carefully, much less write serious code using them, it is evident from even a brief review of their web sites that these are serious languages that take account of the academic developments of the last couple of decades in formulating new language designs to address new classes of problems that have arisen in programming practice.  These languages are type safe, a basic criterion of sensibility, and feature sophisticated type systems that include ideas such as sum types, which have long been missing from commercial languages, or provided only in comically obtuse ways (such as objects).  The infamous null pointer mistakes have been eradicated, and the importance of pattern matching (in the sense of the ML family of languages) is finally being appreciated as the cure for Boolean blindness.  For once I can look at new industrial languages without an overwhelming sense of disappointment, but instead with optimism and enthusiasm that important ideas are finally, at long last, being recognized and adopted.  As has often been observed, it takes 25 years for an academic language idea to make it into industrial practice.  With Java it was simply the 1970’s idea of automatic storage management; with languages such as Rust and Swift we are seeing ideas from the 80’s and 90’s make their way into industrial practice.  It’s cause for celebration, and encouragement for those entering the field: the right ideas do win out in the end, one just has to have the courage to be irrelevant.

I hope to find the time to comment more meaningfully on the recent developments in practical programming languages, including Rust and Swift, but also languages such as Go and OCaml that are also making inroads into programming practice.  (The overwhelming success and future dominance of Haskell is self-evident.  Kudos!) But for now, let me say that the golden age of programming language research is here and now, and promises to continue indefinitely.

Update: word smithing.

## Bellman on “Dynamic Programming”

April 21, 2014

Everyone who has studied algorithms has wondered “why the hell is Bellman’s memorization technique called dynamic programming?”.  I recently learned the answer from my colleague, Guy Blelloch, who dug up the explanation from Richard Bellman himself:

“I spent the Fall quarter (of 1950) at RAND. My first task was to find a name for multistage decision processes.

“An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?’ The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term, mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various rea- sons. I decided therefore to use the word, ‘programming.’ I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying—I thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities” (p. 159).

As with algorithms, so too with dynamic languages?

Update: why is it called “memoization” and not “memorization”?

Update: rewrite of the commentary.

## Old Neglected Theorems Are Still Theorems

March 20, 2014

I have very recently been thinking about the question of partiality vs totality in programming languages, a perennial topic in PL’s that every generation thinks it discovers for itself.  And this got me to remembering an old theorem that, it seems, hardly anyone knows ever existed in the first place.  What I like about the theorem is that it says something specific and technically accurate about the sizes of programs in total languages compared to those in partial languages.  The theorem provides some context for discussion that does not just amount to opinion or attitude (and attitude alway seems to abound when this topic arises).

The advantage of a total programming language such as Goedel’s T is that it ensures, by type checking, that every program terminates, and that every function is total. There is simply no way to have a well-typed program that goes into an infinite loop. This may seem appealing, until one considers that the upper bound on the time to termination can be quite large, so large that some terminating programs might just as well diverge as far as we humans are concerned. But never mind that, let us grant that it is a virtue of  T that it precludes divergence.

Why, then, bother with a language such as PCF that does not rule out divergence? After all, infinite loops are invariably bugs, so why not rule them out by type checking? (Don’t be fooled by glib arguments about useful programs, such as operating systems, that “run forever”. After all, infinite streams are programmable in the language M of inductive and coinductive types in which all functions terminate. Computing infinitely does not mean running forever, it just means “for as long as one wishes, without bound.”)  The notion does seem appealing until one actually tries to write a program in a language such as T.

Consider computing the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two natural numbers. This can be easily programmed in PCF by solving the following equations using general recursion:

$\begin{array}{rcl} \textit{gcd}(m,0) & = & m \\ \textit{gcd}(0,m) & = & m \\ \textit{gcd}(m,n) & = & \textit{gcd}(m-n,n) \quad \text{if}\ m>n \\ \textit{gcd}(m,n) & = & \textit{gcd}(m,n-m) \quad \text{if}\ m

The type of $\textit{gcd}$ defined in this manner has partial function type $(\mathbb{N}\times \mathbb{N})\rightharpoonup \mathbb{N}$, which suggests that it may not terminate for some inputs. But we may prove by induction on the sum of the pair of arguments that it is, in fact, a total function.

Now consider programming this function in T. It is, in fact, programmable using only primitive recursion, but the code to do it is rather painful (try it!). One way to see the problem is that in T the only form of looping is one that reduces a natural number by one on each recursive call; it is not (directly) possible to make a recursive call on a smaller number other than the immediate predecessor. In fact one may code up more general patterns of terminating recursion using only primitive recursion as a primitive, but if you examine the details, you will see that doing so comes at a significant price in performance and program complexity. Program complexity can be mitigated by building libraries that codify standard patterns of reasoning whose cost of development should be amortized over all programs, not just one in particular. But there is still the problem of performance. Indeed, the encoding of more general forms of recursion into primitive recursion means that, deep within the encoding, there must be “timer” that “goes down by ones” to ensure that the program terminates. The result will be that programs written with such libraries will not be nearly as fast as they ought to be.  (It is actually quite fun to derive “course of values” recursion from primitive recursion, and then to observe with horror what is actually going on, computationally, when using this derived notion.)

But, one may argue, T is simply not a serious language. A more serious total programming language would admit sophisticated patterns of control without performance penalty. Indeed, one could easily envision representing the natural numbers in binary, rather than unary, and allowing recursive calls to be made by halving to achieve logarithmic complexity. This is surely possible, as are numerous other such techniques. Could we not then have a practical language that rules out divergence?

We can, but at a cost.  One limitation of total programming languages is that they are not universal: you cannot write an interpreter for T within T (see Chapter 9 of PFPL for a proof).  More importantly, this limitation extends to any total language whatever.  If this limitation does not seem important, then consider the Blum Size Theorem (BST) (from 1967), which places a very different limitation on total languages.  Fix any total language, L, that permits writing functions on the natural numbers. Pick any blowup factor, say $2^{2^n}$, or however expansive you wish to be.  The BST states that there is a total function on the natural numbers that is programmable in L, but whose shortest program in L is larger by the given blowup factor than its shortest program in PCF!

The underlying idea of the proof is that in a total language the proof of termination of a program must be baked into the code itself, whereas in a partial language the termination proof is an external verification condition left to the programmer. Roughly speaking, there are, and always will be, programs whose termination proof is rather complicated to express, if you fix in advance the means by which it may be proved total. (In T it was primitive recursion, but one can be more ambitious, yet still get caught by the BST.)  But if you leave room for ingenuity, then programs can be short, precisely because they do not have to embed the proof of their termination in their own running code.

There are ways around the BST, of course, and I am not saying otherwise.  For example, the BST merely guarantees the existence of a bad case, so one can always argue that such a case will never arise in practice.  Could be, but I did mention the GCD in T problem for a reason: there are natural problems that are difficult to express in a language such as T.  By fixing the possible termination arguments in advance, one is tempting fate, for there are many problems, such as the Collatz Conjecture, for which the termination proof of a very simple piece of code has been an open problem for decades, and has resisted at least some serious attempts on it.  One could argue that such a function is of no practical use.  I agree, but I point out the example not to say that it is useful, but to say that it is likely that its eventual termination proof will be quite nasty, and that this will have to be reflected in the program itself if you are limited to a T-like language (rendering it, once again, useless).  For another example, there is no inherent reason why termination need be assured by means similar to that used in T.  We got around this issue in NuPRL by separating the code from the proof, using a type theory based on a partial programming language, not a total one.  The proof of termination is still required for typing in the core theory (but not in the theory with “bar types” for embracing partiality).  But it’s not baked into the code itself, affecting its run-time; it is “off to the side”, large though it may be).

Updates: word smithing, fixed bad link, corrected gcd, removed erroneous parenthetical reference to Coq, fixed LaTeX problems.

## Homotopy Type Theory Lectures and Notes On-Line

December 4, 2013

My activity on this blog has been reduced to nil recently because I have been spending my time preparing a series of lectures on homotopy type theory, starting from basic principles and ending with the application of univalence and higher inductive types to algebraic topology.  The course web page contains links to the video-taped lectures and to the course notes prepared by the students this semester.  These will be available indefinitely and are accessible to anyone interested in the course.  My hope is that these will provide a useful introduction to the HoTT Book, which is available for free on the web and may be printed on demand.  My intention is to write an introduction to dependent type theory for a CS audience, which will serve as a reference for much ongoing work in the area and as a prolegomenon to the HoTT Book itself.

## What, If Anything, Is A Declarative Language?

July 18, 2013

Back in the 1980’s it was very fashionable to talk about “declarative” programming languages.  But to my mind there was never a clear definition of a “declarative language”, and hence no way to tell what is declarative and what is not.  Lacking any clear meaning, the term came to refer to the arbitrary conflation of functional with logic programming to such an extent that “functional-and-logic-programming” almost became a Germanic thing-in-itself (ding an sich).  Later, as the logic programming wave subsided, the term “declarative”,  like “object-oriented”, came to be an expression of approval, and then, mercifully, died out.

Or so I had thought.  Earlier this week I attended a thriller of an NSF-sponsored workshop on high-level programming models for parallelism, where I was surprised by the declarative zombie once again coming to eat our brains.  This got me to thinking, again, about whether the term has any useful meaning.  For what it’s worth, and perhaps to generate useful debate, here’re some things that I think people mean, and why I don’t think they mean very much.

1. “Declarative” means “high-level”.  This just seems to replace one vague term by another.
2. “Declarative” means “not imperative”.  But this flies in the face of reality.  Functional languages embrace and encompass imperative programming as a special case, and even Prolog has imperative features, such as assert and retract, that have imperative meaning.
3. “Declarative” means “functional”.  OK, but then we don’t really need another word.
4. “Declarative” means “what, not how”.  But every language has an operational semantics that defines how to execute its programs, and you must be aware of that semantics to understand programs written in it.  Haskell has a definite evaluation order, just as much as ML has a different one, and even Prolog execution is defined by a clear operational semantics that determines the clause order and that can be influenced by “cut”.
5. “Declarative” means “equational”.  This does not distinguish anything, because there is a well-defined notion of equivalence for any programming language, namely observational equivalence.  Different languages induce different equivalences, of course, but how does one say that one equivalence is “better” than another?  At any rate, I know of no stress on equational properties of logic programs, so either logic programs are not “declarative” or “equational reasoning” is not their defining characteristic.
6. “Declarative” means “referentially transparent”.  The misappropriation of Quine’s terminology only confuses matters.  All I’ve been able to make of this is that “referentially transparent” means that beta-equivalence is valid.  But beta equivalence is not a property of an arbitrary programming language, nor in any case is it clear why this equivalence is first among equals.  In any case why you would decide a priori on what equivalences you want before you even know what it means to run a program?
7. “Declarative” means “has a denotation”.  This gets closer to the point, I think, because we might well say that a declarative semantics is one that gives meaning to programs as some kind of mapping between some sort of spaces.  In other words, it would be a synonym for “denotational semantics”.  But every language has a denotational semantics (perhaps by interpretation into a Kripke structure to impose sequencing), so having one does not seem to distinguish a useful class of languages.  Moreover, even in the case of purely functional programs, the usual denotational semantics (as continuous maps) is not fully abstract, and the fully abstract semantics (as games) is highly operational.  Perhaps a language is declarative in proportion to being able to give it semantics in some “familiar” mathematical setting?
8. “Declarative” means “implicitly parallelizable“.  This was certainly the sense intended at the NSF meeting, but no two “declarative” languages seemed to have much in common.  Charlie Garrod proposes just “implicit”, which is pretty much synonymous with “high level”, and may be the most precise sense there is to the term.

No doubt this list is not exhaustive, but I think it covers many of the most common interpretations.  It seems to me that none of them have a clear meaning or distinguish a well-defined class of languages.  Which leads me to ask, is there any such thing as a declarative programming language?

[Thanks to the late Steve Gould for inspiring the title of this post.]

[Update: wordsmithing.]

## Exceptions Are Shared Secrets

December 3, 2012

Exceptions are commonly criticized as being the “goto’s” of modern programming languages.  Raising an exception transfers control to an unknown destination, it is said, and this is a bad thing on engineering grounds.  I disagree.  It is perfectly predictable where a raised exception will be handled, provided that exceptions are done properly, which, unfortunately, is not always the case.

The crucial point that exception values are shared secrets. Let us distinguish two parties, the raiser of the exception, and the handler of it. The fundamental idea of exceptions is to transfer a value from the raiser to the handler without the possibility of interception by another party. While the language of secrecy seems appropriately evocative, I hasten to add that I am not here concerned with “attackers” or suchlike, but merely with the difficulties of ensuring modular composition of programs from components. In such a setting the “attacker” is yourself, who is not malicious, but who is fallible.

By raising an exception the raiser is “contacting” a handler with a message. The raiser wishes to limit which components of a program may intercept that message. More precisely, the raiser wishes to ensure that only certain previously agreed-upon components may handle that exception, perhaps only one. This property should remain stable under extension to the program or composition with any other component. It should not be possible for an innocent third party to accidentally intercept a message that was not intended for it.

Achieving this requires a secrecy mechanism that allows the raiser and the handler(s) to agree upon their cooperation. This is accomplished by dynamic classification, exactly as it is done properly in Standard ML (but not O’Caml). The idea is that the raiser has access to a dynamically generated constructor for exception values, and any handler has access to the corresponding dynamically generated matcher for exception values. This means that the handler, and only the handler, can decode the message sent by the raiser; no other party can do anything with it other than pass it along unexamined. It is “perfectly encrypted” and cannot be deciphered by any unintended component.

The usual exception mechanisms, as distinct from exception values, allow for “wild-card handlers”, which means that an exception can be intercepted by a third party. This means that the raiser cannot ensure that the handler actually receives the message, but it can ensure, using dynamic classification, that only a legitimate handler may decipher it. Decades of experience with Standard ML shows that this is a very useful thing indeed, and has application far beyond just the simple example considered here. For full details, see my forthcoming book, for a full discussion of dynamic classification and its role for ensuring integrity and confidentiality in a program. Dynamic classification is not just for “security”, but is rather a good tool for everyday programming.

Haskell is one language that does not get exceptions right.  Allocating an exception incurs a storage effect, and so would have to be confined to the IO monad in Haskell.  But this would destroy the utility of exceptions in pure code.  The result is an exception mechanism that is arguably broken and that does not provide the guarantees that make exceptions a perfectly pleasant and useful way to write code.

Update: Reworked last paragraph to clarify the point I am making; the previous formulation appears to have invited misinterpretation.

Update: This account of exceptions also makes clear why the perennial suggestion to put exception-raising information into types makes no sense to me. I will write more about this in a future post, but meanwhile contemplate that a computation may raise an exception that is not even in principle nameable in the type. That is, it is not conservativity that’s at issue, it’s the very idea.

Update: Wordsmithing, removal of irrelevant remarks to focus on the main point about dynamic exceptions.

Follow