Matthias Felleisen at BYU CS Colloquium: Adding Types to Untyped Languages


BYU Block Y Mattahias Felleisen from Northeastern University will be delivering the CS Colloquium at BYU on Thursday Nov 4 at 11am. Here's the abstract of the talk:

Over the last 15 years, we have experienced a programming language renaissance. Numerous scripting languages have become widely used in industrial and open-source projects. They have supplemented the existing mainstream languages---C++ and Java---and, in contexts such as systems administration and web programming, they have started to play a dominant role. While each scripting language comes with its own philosophy, their designers share an antipathy to types. As a result, these languages come without a static type system. Most script developers initially welcome this freedom, but soon discover that the lack of a type system deprives them of an essential maintenance tool.

My talk explains my team's approach to equip such languages with a type system. The goal of our work is to empower programmers so that they can gradually enrich scripts with types on a module-by-module basis as they perform maintenance work on the system. Naturally, we wish to ensure type soundness so that the type annotations are meaningful, and we wish to accommodate the programming idioms of the original language in order to keep the overhead of type enrichment low.

From Adding Types to Untyped Languages | BYU Computer Science Department
Referenced Mon Oct 18 2010 10:49:38 GMT-0600 (MDT)

Matthias is one of the deep thinkers in the area of programming language design and someone I admire very much. If you're at all interested in programming language design, you'll want to make this talk.


Please leave comments using the Hypothes.is sidebar.

Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:19 2019.