The Essence of Programming: Reynoldsfest at MFPS

Having just got back from the Reynoldsfest at MFPS, where part of the emphasis was on encouraging folk to look at Reynolds work, let me write down some of what was recommended.

My personal favorites:
Definitional Interpreters (this one changed my life when I was a graduate student)
Gedanken
Towards a Theory of Type Structure
Types, Abstraction and Parametric Polymorphism
The Essence of Algol
Syntactic Control of Interference
Three Approaches to Type Structure (tutorial)
The Discoveries of Continuations (history)

Some papers recommended by others:
The Craft of Programming (recommended by Cliff Jones)
Relating direct and continuation semantics (Filinski's favorite -- this one is tough going)
Separation Logic: A Logic for Shared Mutable Data Structures

Also, while I'm at it, let me recommend
You and Your Research, by Richard Hamming. Want to do Nobel-class research? It's not just a matter of luck. Here is a nuts and bolts guide, from the third winner of the Turing Award.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Great papers

Some of these papers were discussed here on LtU in the past. LtU readers are encouraged to look them up, and read them.

Personally, I really like the definitional interpreters paper and the historical paper on the discoveries of continuations.

Excellent List

Coming across a list of papers that includes titles I haven't heard of before is like striking gold! Thanks for posting this.

Unfortunatly CiteSeer appears to be down at the moment.

LtU archives

I suggest searching the LtU archive (search box is on the upper right hand corner). You'll find direct links to some of the papers on the list, as well as useful discussions related to them.

(And if you want more papers, I suggest digging through the archives. Hundreds of interesting papers were discussed here over the years)

Papers

Definitional Interpreters (dvi.gz, ps.gz) (also Definitional Interpreters revisited (ps.gz, dvi.gz))
Gedanken (pdf)
Towards a Theory of Type Structure (pdf)
Types, Abstraction and Parametric Polymorphism (pdf)
The Essence of Algol (ps.gz, dvi.gz)
Syntactic Control of Interference (ps.gz, dvi.gz) (also Part 2 (ps.gz dvi.gz))
Three Approaches to Type Structure (?)
The Discoveries of Continuations (pdf, dvi.gz, ps.gz)
The Craft of Programming (pdf)
On the relation between direct and continuation semantics (pdf)
Separation Logic: A Logic for Shared Mutable Data Structures (ps.gz, dvi.gz)

Others

Wow

Danke