Hopefully this post will be short and sweet, since I'm trying to get back on EST.

Highlights from this year's PLDI:

  • Year of PLASMA! John Vilk's DoppioJVM won Best Artifact. His talk was great, and he event got a mid-talk round of applause for a meta-circular evaluator joke. Nothing like Scheme to whet the appetites of PL nerds! (I admit it, I clapped and laughed, too.)
  • Year of PLASMA! In a surprising turn of events, my work on SurveyMan won top prize in the Graduate category of the ACM Student Research Competition. This means I'll submit a short paper in a few months to compete in the Grand Finals! Exciting!
  • The APPROX was awesome! It was very exciting to see current work presented across approximate computing and probabilistic programming. Emery was chair of the event. Given the amount of discussion it engendered, I would say it was a resounding success.
  • I met a bunch of new people, and connected with those I haven't seen in a while. Shoutouts to Adrian Sampson and Michael Carbin. I'll be following Adrian's blog now, and pestering Michael about formalizing the SurveyMan semantics (using his work on reasoning about relaxed programs as a guide).
  • A cheeky dig at the New York Times lead to Phil Wadler telling me that I had the best teaser! Famous professors : they're just like us!
  • Shriram Krishnamurthi declared he'd read this blog.

In other news, I need to try uploading my VM for the OOPSLA artifact evaluation, now that I have reasonable internet again. But first, I need to sleep (though I did set aside time to watch GoT -- OMG, the ending was awesome! Arya's face! That exchange! WTF just happened?!?!? Also, shit's finally starting to get real, north of the wall! You know nothing, Jon Snow...)