Lambda the Ultimate

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Feyerabend Project organized several workshops to discuss and develop new ways to think of programming languages and computing in general. A new event in this direction is a new workshop that will take place in Brussels, in April, co-located with the new <Programming> conference -- also worth a look.

Salon des Refusés -- Dialectics for new computer science
April 2017, Brussels

Salon des Refusés (“exhibition of rejects”) was an 1863 exhibition of artworks rejected from the official Paris Salon. The jury of Paris Salon required near-photographic realism and classified works according to a strict genre hierarchy. Paintings by many, later famous, modernists such as Édouard Manet were rejected and appeared in what became known as the Salon des Refusés. This workshop aims to be the programming language research equivalent of Salon des Refusés. We provide venue for exploring new ideas and new ways of doing computer science.

Many interesting ideas about programming might struggle to find space in the modern programming language research community, often because they are difficult to evaluate using established evaluation methods (be it proofs, measurements or controlled user studies). As a result, new ideas are often seen as “unscientific”.

This workshop provides a venue where such interesting and thought provoking ideas can be exposed to critical evaluation. Submissions that provoke interesting discussion among the program committee members will be published together with an attributed review that presents an alternative position, develops additional context or summarizes discussion from the workshop. This means of engaging with papers not just enables explorations of novel programming ideas, but also enourages new ways of doing computer science.

The workshop's webpage also contains descriptions of of some formats that could "make it possible to think about programming in a new way", including: Thought experiments, Experimentation, Paradigms, Metaphors, myths and analogies, and From jokes to science fiction.

For writings on similar questions about formalism, paradigms or method in programming language research, see Richard Gabriel's work, especially The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution (2012) and Writers’ Workshops As Scientific Methodology (?)), Thomas Petricek's work, especially Against a Universal Definition of 'Type' (2015) and Programming language theory Thinking the unthinkable (2016)), and Jonathan Edwards' blog: Alarming Development.

For programs of events of similar inspiration in the past, you may be interested in the Future of Programming workshops: program of 2014, program of September 2015, program of October 2015. Other events that are somewhat similar in spirit -- but maybe less radical in content -- are Onward!, NOOL and OBT.

I am very enthusiastic about the following paper: it brings new ideas and solves a problem that I did not expect to be solvable, namely usable type inference when both polymorphism and subtyping are implicit. (By "usable" here I mean that the inferred types are both compact and principal, while previous work generally had only one of those properties.)

Polymorphism, Subtyping, and Type Inference in MLsub
Stephen Dolan and Alan Mycroft
2017

We present a type system combining subtyping and ML-style parametric polymorphism. Unlike previous work, our system supports type inference and has compact principal types. We demonstrate this system in the minimal language MLsub, which types a strict superset of core ML programs.

This is made possible by keeping a strict separation between the types used to describe inputs and those used to describe outputs, and extending the classical unification algorithm to handle subtyping constraints between these input and output types. Principal types are kept compact by type simplification, which exploits deep connections between subtyping and the algebra of regular languages. An implementation is available online.

The paper is full of interesting ideas. For example, one idea is that adding type variables to the base grammar of types -- instead of defining them by their substitution -- forces us to look at our type systems in ways that are more open to extension with new features. I would recommend looking at this paper even if you are interested in ML and type inference, but not subtyping, or in polymorphism and subtyping, but not type inference, or in subtyping and type inference, but not functional languages.

This paper is also a teaser for the first's author PhD thesis, Algebraic Subtyping. There is also an implementation available.

(If you are looking for interesting work on inference of polymorphism and subtyping in object-oriented languages, I would recommend Getting F-Bounded Polymorphism into Shape by Ben Greenman, Fabian Muehlboeck and Ross Tate, 2014.)