Christopher de Sa and I have been working on a category theoretic approach to optimizing MapReduce-like pipelines. Actually, we didn’t start with any category theory—we were originally trying to impose some structure on some of the existing loop optimizations that the Delite compiler performed, and along the way, we rediscovered the rich relationship between category [...]
In which the author muses that “semi-formal methods” (that is, non computer-assisted proof writing) should take a more active role in allowing software engineers to communicate with one another. C++0x has a lot of new, whiz-bang features in it, one of which is the atomic operations library. This library has advanced features that enable compiler [...]
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a colloquium given by Chung-Chieh Shan on Embedding Probabilistic Languages. A full account for the talk can be found in this paper, so I want to focus in on one specific big idea: the idea that data is code. Lispers are well acquainted with the mantra, “code is [...]