Four vacancies

Julian Bradfield, head of LFCS, writes:

We have just advertised the first four of what will, it is hoped,
ultimately be ten posts funded via SICSA (a.k.a. "pooling").

Three of the four are areas in which LFCS has an interest, so please
communicate the existence of these posts to anyone or any community
you know where good candidates may be found.

The announced topics are:

• Software Engineering
  
• Modelling/Concurrency
  
• Security
  
• Large Scale and Robust Natural Language Processing
  

and each post may be at Lecturer or Reader level, depending on the
applications.

The official ad is at the link above.

Note that there is a single vacancy reference, so applicants should
make clear the post(s) they wish to apply for.

Functional languages on NearlyFreeSpeech.net

Haskell, Lisp, OCaml, and Scheme (as well as C, C++, Fortran, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl) are the languages supported by NearlyFreeSpeech.net, a web hosting company. I enjoyed reading their FAQ.

Real-World Haskell

A forthcoming O'Reilly book on Haskell, by Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen. Interestingly, O’Reilly has agreed to publish chapters online, under a Creative Commons License. (Great that they managed to achieve this, O'Reilly was reluctant to consider something similar when Maurice and I proposed it for our book.)

Festschrift for John C. Reynolds’s 70th birthday

Edited by Olivier Danvy, Peter O’Hearn and Philip Wadler. The community says Thank You to John Reynolds for a lifetime of inspiring ideas. Happy birthday, John!

Reith Lectures 2007

Taking his lead from John Kennedy's precept 'Peace is a Process', in the 2007 Reith Lectures, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, lays out a system of initiatives that government, institutions, and citizens can follow to achieve peace, limit climate change, and reduce economic inequality. In the last lecture, he claims a special place for scientists to organize to solve the world's ills, and cites Wikipedia and Linux as a model---a sort of Open Source government. Heady stuff; it's not often one encounters this scope of vision. The lectures are delivered from London, Beijing, New York, and (for the finale) Edinburgh, home of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment.

Oh no! Alligators!

One of my great joys on visiting Berkeley was to meet Bret Victor, of Magic Ink fame. I mentioned to him that I had been working with a student on a visual lambda calculus, in part because I wanted a way to explain lambda calculus to my eight-year old daughter and son. He responded with a game involving alligators and their eggs, such a clever morphing of lambda calculus that it wasn't until I reached the end that I realized exactly what was going on.

So far, I've had a chance to show it to my daughter, who managed to successfully solve the problem at the end. She guessed a definition of 'not', and then applied 'not' to 'true' and checked that the result is 'false'. But she was most interested in drawing pictures of alligators! I expect it would be more fun to use if there was software that implemented the game.

Bret also pointed to David Keenan's graphical lambda calculus, based on Raymond Smullyan's "To Mock a Mockingbird".

LambdaVM

A backend for GHC that compiles to the JVM, by Brian Alliet. Thanks to Adam Megacz for the pointer.

Visit Stanford, Google, Intel Berkeley

Many thanks to my hosts who invited me to speak at Stanford, Google, and Intel Berkeley. A link to the video of my Google talk is above, Intel Berkeley tells me they will also post a video.

I met quite a few interesting folk on my visit, including Dominic Hughes, Adam Chlipala, Adam Megacz, and Bret Victor (of Magic Ink fame).

Google Tech Talk: Parametric Polymorphism

A talk by Phil Gossett given in Google's Advanced Programming Language series. Cites my work on type classes and the Girard-Reynolds isomorphism; I was pleased to see he began by discussing Frege and Russell, and finished by describing Lennart Augustsson's Djinn. Nice talk, and has me looking forward to speaking at Google (which I'm scheduled to do this Friday); my talk will cover some similar material. (I tried to find Gossett's e-mail and failed, maybe this will help me get in touch.)

I spotted a couple of technical errors in the talk. (1) He suggested that the Girard-Reynolds Isomorphism guarantees that every term that has a given polymorphic type is isomorphic; in fact, distinct proofs of a theorem correspond to distinct terms of a type. (2) In answer to a question, he said that parametricity does not extend to type classes; in fact, my paper Theorems for Free includes a sketch of how parametricity does extend to type classes (see Section 3.4).

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

A screed by Bret Victor. The only document I've read that compares with Edward Tufte (author of four famous books on information design). Shows how beautiful a web page can be. My favourite parts were

• Demonstration: Showing the data. Redesigning Amazon as an information graphic.
• Demonstration: Arranging the data. Redesigning Yahoo! Movies as an information graphic.

I would skip to those to start. Spotted via Lambda the Ultimate.