Freedom from kings. Freedom from fascism. Power to the people forever. ♥️ Happy Independence Day 🇺🇸

#LiquidTypes are a lightweight way to specify and check code properties. What stands in the way of more widespread adoption? Friday at 10:30, @catarinavgamboa.bsky.social presents our #PLDI2025 paper (with Abigail Reese and @alcidesfonseca.com), "Usability Barriers for Liquid Types."

1/3 The US didn’t end up leading the world in computing by luck. It happened because it made long-term, public investments in basic research, especially through NSF. That’s what created the breakthroughs that today’s tech companies are built on.

I'm delighted to announce the 5th edition of Programming Language Pragmatics! I joined Michael Scott as a coauthor. We updated the semantics chapter to use inference rules, & substantially updated coverage of types, OO, codegen, Rust ownership & safe concurrency, async, traits & more!

My largest remaining NSF grant, that was awarded by a competitive process on the recommendation of national experts, was terminated yesterday. The money would have paid for PhD students to invent better AI systems for everyday people who need programs written for them but who can't or won't write...

Thinking about devastating cuts to NSF: US gov-funded science has been the engine upon which most of the tech wealth was generated. But the oligarchs (currently hoarding much of that $) think it’s their own brilliance & not the accident of standing close to the scientific engine that made them rich.

I feel like we need to keep saying this because it’s so insane: This is a legal U.S. resident who has been detained for over a month now for his political opinions.

I care less about Signal chats and more about the blacksite offshore concentration camps we're sending random people to without any semblance of a trial, so I'll be interested to see if the national media can rub their bellies and pat their heads at the same time this week. Historically they can't.

MIT following Harvard's lead here

In case you missed this update, no longer 70%, it’s 90% of people abducted and sent to El Salvador are innocent (“no US criminal record”)

60 Minutes found no criminal record for 75% of the Venezuelan migrants the U.S. sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. https://cbsn.ws/4lC4Vp5

A Study of Undefined Behavior Across Foreign Function Boundaries in #rustlang Libraries arxiv.org/abs/2404.11671

🦀 Hello World! The Rust project now has an official presence on Bluesky! ✨ We'll be posting the same on our Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, so you won't miss anything on either platform.

Two updates: 1) early registration for physical attendees has been extended to April 1 and late registration to April 18, and 2) travel grant information is available on the VerifyThis website (verifythis.ethz.ch), apply by April 8. Hope to see you there!

PLMW@PLDI'25 is now accepting applications: pldi25.sigplan.org/home/PLMW-pl... Deadline: April 10, 2025 PLMW an excellent place to learn about exciting PL research, from the ground up, and to find your PL friends! Please apply!

For formal methods folks looking for a new position: @VeridiseInc is hiring a formal methods researcher to work on verification/analysis tools targeting zero-knowledge applications. More details are here: veridise.com/careers/zk-r...

ECOOP 2025 Round 2 papers are due tomorrow! Submit your best work! 2025.ecoop.org/track/ecoop-...

Are you graduating with a PhD? Do you work on program analysis, formal verification, software correctness, or AI? Apply to join the UMass LASER lab as a postdoctoral researcher, a vibrant team focused on using the latest NLP technology to ensure software correctness!

VerifyThis is a series of program verification competitions bringing together those interested in formal verification. The 2025 edition will be held as a hybrid workshop with ETAPS. Early registration for physical attendees is open until Feb. 28. For more information see verifythis.ethz.ch. 1/2

I recently gave one of the best talks of my career thus far, and thankfully it was recorded, so I figured I share that here! Thoughts/ideas/questions welcome! scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Page...

If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general. If you wanted more waste, fraud, and abuse, you would fire them.

🧵"So this is how liberty dies..." Trump’s first 3 weeks have been a relentless flood of actions. It's incredibly hard to keep up. I’ve gone through 69 actions & mapped out the pattern - showing how they fall within 5 broad domains consistent with authoritarian states 1/9

Please remember something: if you had said a year ago that Trump would do even a fraction of these things, you would have been mocked, belittled, accused of “Trump derangement syndrome,” and dismissed by certain people. Identify those people and block and shun them.

NSF proposed Trump budget goes from $9Bil->$3Bil, wow--can you believe that $6Bil of all NSF funding goes to DEI!?

To be honest, I'm surprised every scientific agency and university and so on is getting on its knees for this administration rather than actually resisting fascism in some meaningful way

This statement from CRA outlines the critical importance that the National Science Foundation plays for our nation's prosperity, security, and future. I highly recommend sharing it with your colleagues, and calling your representatives in Congress to convey these benefits to them in your own words!

It scares the shit out of me that all of my grant applications can be subject to extra review because my CV says "LGBT" and "Diversity," like what terrible fascist dystopia is this

One thing that will become blatantly obvious with our higher education and scientific institutions is that their statements of "core values" don't mean shit.

This week, the NSF Director became complicit in the administration’s efforts to undermine American science. https://bit.ly/nsfresign

If you are a PhD student in computer science who is directly impacted by the last two weeks of orders, please know that it's ok to not be in a headspace for research If anyone is pushing you to be productive despite it all, please reach out to me, or SIGPLAN CARES, or computingconnections.org

One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.

Are you interested in getting a PhD in Programming Languages, particularly on practical and theoretical aspects of gradual typing? Consider working with me at the Australian National University. PhDs in Australia take 3-4 years, see tinyurl.com/ANUPLPhD . If you're there, find me at POPL this week!

Been thinking about these ideas for a couple of years! Finally time to put them into action and make the SRC an awesome place for junior researchers to get high-quality feedback on ongoing work!

Mentoring is incredibly important to students and young researchers. @notypes.bsky.social and @avh.bsky.social talk about the "missing mentoring pillar" in our latest PL Perspectives blog post blog.sigplan.org/2025/01/13/t...

Thomas Wies (NYU) and I are organizing the 2025 edition of the VerifyThis competition and we are currently looking for interesting academic or industry verification problems. The deadline for submission is Feb. 7. See the call for problems for more information: www.pm.inf.ethz.ch/research/ver....

If you are going to POPL 2025 in Denver consider coming to my talk at #PEPM2025 on the missing diagonal. The computing community has produced many high level languages and tools for programming high level systems (e.g. Java for user interfaces) popl25.sigplan.org/details/pepm...

Who are the new* PL faculty in US? If you / someone you started in as a PL faculty, can you please point me to them? *last two years and starting next year

I have created a Starter Pack for Software Engineering Research Software Engineering Researchers, from Academia or Industry #SEResearch Some PL people too bsky.app/starter-pack...

A secondary area of focus is security. Security-focused researchers should apply through the CyLab application site (www.cylab.cmu.edu/about/hiring...), and will be considered for appointments in S3D (mention S3D in your cover letter). 2/3

The Software and Societal Systems (S3D) department in the School of Computer Science at CMU is hiring tenure-track faculty! This year we are especially looking in AI/ML for SE. Applications due Dec 11, apply at apply.interfolio.com/150683 1/3

We have six open faculty positions in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, with software engineering among the focus areas! Outstanding candidates across all areas of computer science are encouraged to apply. More info at www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Not only is Raghav’s research cool, he is also an excellent teacher! He has been my GTA for two semesters in OOP and has been basically operating as a co-instructor. He also taught data structures on his own in summer. Students in all sections loved and learned a lot from him. You should hire him!!!

Verify the Safety of the Rust Standard Library aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/ope...

I don't know who needs to hear this, but a linkedin username is not a substitute for a personal webpage. It's not accessible to other researchers looking you up who don't have a linkedin account because we're academics who don't have a real job so why would we want one.

MIT's EECS grad application deadline is today! If you're excited about applying PL & Compilers ideas to high-performance hardware design, apply to work with me! flame.csail.mit.edu/lab/prospect...

Hi, Bluesky! 👋 I’m Catarina, a dual PhD student in 🖥️ Software Engineering with the CMU Portugal program ( @carnegiemellon.bsky.social and U. Lisbon). Imagine a world with reliable software and user-friendly verification tools. Let’s build it together! 🚀 #PhDlife #SE #PL #HCI #CMU-Portugal

I’ve been lurking for a bit, but with the influx of academics, good time for a quick (re-)intro? CS prof at Carnegie Mellon, specialty Software Engineering, especially all kinds of code transformation/program repair (so yes, a lot of AI codegen these days), plus SE4robotics sometimes. 1/

Interesting piece by Will Crichton. When we write and evaluate papers, we act as if PL design is all science and theory. But really, it's also an art form where subtler, harder to measure things are at play. blog.sigplan.org/2024/11/21/e...