## PL's hotness challenge

Blog post on HN. Only the intro is related to PL:

I’m trying to get into neural networks. There have been a couple big breakthroughs in the field in recent years and suddenly my side project of messing around with programming languages seemed short sighted. It almost seems like we’ll have real AI soon and I want to be working on that. While making my first couple steps into the field it’s hard to keep that enthusiasm. A lot of the field is still kinda handwavy where when you want to find out why something is used the way it’s used, the only answer you can get is “because it works like this and it doesn’t work if we change it.”

Putting my ear to the ground, competition from ML has become more and more common not just in PL, but also in systems, I know many researchers who are re-purposing their skills right now while it has become more difficult to find grad students/interns.

So, is this something we should be worried about? What could happen to make PL more competitive in terms of exciting results/mindshare?

## Chez Scheme now open-source

Kent Dybvig (Cadence Research, Cisco Systems) has released the commercial scheme compiler Chez Scheme (scheme.com) as open source on GitHub. Chez Scheme is a native code generating optimizing compiler for R6RS focusing on performance and productivity. It supports cross-compilation, threading, and many other extensions. Current version is 9.4.

I'm excited to see what the community will build with this great tool.

https://github.com/cisco/chezscheme

## Elements of Programming in Rust

I have been working on implementing the algorithms and concepts in Stepanov's "Elements of Programming" in Rust. I have started with chapter 6 "Iterators" as I think it involves the most complex type mechanics, and if it is possible to translate this, the rest should be doable. I have posted what I have so far which is all the plain Iterator algorithms as I now think it will be possible to complete the translation.

There are some issues:

- I cannot define the dereference operators to work on values (they should be the identity function on values), this limits the generality of algorithms, in that we cannot write an algorithm that will operate on both a value and an iterator.
- I am not happy with passing some arguments by moved values, and some by borrowed reference as it makes the function APIs harder to work with, but at the moment I can see no alternative. Ideally there should be a way of defining an algorithm generically over both.
- Currently I am passing closures by moved value as this makes them cleaner to pass in, but this means where a closure is passed to other functions more than once, as reference has to be taken. This will cause problems in there recursive case where there will be an accumulation of references with recursion depth, however auto-dereferencing in function application stops the code getting ugly. I am not sure if this results in a performance issue. One solution would be to pass all closures by mutable-reference, but I am not sure this is the best answer.

Here's the link to the repo: https://github.com/keean/elements_in_rust

I am interested in comments about improving the implementation, how generic programming looks in Rust, how Rust could be improved to deal with the issues above, and any other issues that people can spot.

## Remora: An Array-Oriented Language with Static Rank Polymorphism

The paper: An Array-Oriented Language with Static Rank Polymorphism, Justin Slepak, Olin Shivers, and Panagiotis Manolios, Northeastern University, 2014.
Abstract. The array-computational model pioneered by Iverson’s lan- guages APL and J offers a simple and expressive solution to the “von Neumann bottleneck.” It includes a form of rank, or dimensional, poly- morphism, which renders much of a program’s control structure im- plicit by lifting base operators to higher-dimensional array structures. We present the first formal semantics for this model, along with the first static type system that captures the full power of the core language.

The formal dynamic semantics of our core language, Remora, illu- minates several of the murkier corners of the model. This allows us to resolve some of the model’s ad hoc elements in more general, regular ways. Among these, we can generalise the model from SIMD to MIMD computations, by extending the semantics to permit functions to be lifted to higher-dimensional arrays in the same way as their arguments.

Our static semantics, a dependent type system of carefully restricted power, is capable of describing array computations whose dimensions cannot be determined statically. The type-checking problem is decidable and the type system is accompanied by the usual soundness theorems. Our type system’s principal contribution is that it serves to extract the implicit control structure that provides so much of the language’s expres- sive power, making this structure explicitly apparent at compile time.

## Binary Representation - Is it something to rise above?

There is a tension in programming language design. Are we describing operations, or are we describing semantics?

I have a strong opinion that these are separate spheres - that representation should be either fully above or fully below the language's native level of abstraction - and that it is therefore hard for a language to do both well.

At one extreme, C, Pascal, Fortran, etc -- all those old classic statically compiled languages -- are primarily for describing machine operations, and specifically machine operations on bits and bytes. To the extent that they have type systems at all, the types each refer to a specific range of memory - bits and bytes - mapped directly to a template that specifies the bit-level encoding of each value.

At the other end, R4RS scheme - I think that was the last version that this mostly applied to. R4RS scheme was, aside from a few warts, a language in which caring how something was represented in bits and bytes just wasn't a relevant question. The programming model was a simple one in which things were values, or containers for values, and if you cared how a character or a number was represented in bits, then it could only be because you were making a mistake.

Numbers were numeric values, not a specific number of bits with a specific mapping of bit patterns to numbers. Characters were character values, not a specific number of bits with a specific mapping. They had no numeric values. In principle you didn't know, or even care, whether you were working on a machine were everything was represented in nine-trit "trytes" at the bottom level; there was just no reference to representation anywhere in the language's semantics, because the abstraction barrier was drawn above the level of representation.

I recently observed that C was a language for describing machine operations, and scheme a language for describing semantics, and this is what I meant. The C programming model makes no sense if types don't represent specific memory-aligned areas with specific bit-pattern-to-value mappings. R4RS scheme's programming model would have made no sense if they were. They operate at entirely different levels of abstraction.

Another topic recently asked what would be the characteristics of a good successor language to scheme, or of a future direction for scheme - and I think that representational abstraction barrier is an important property of any high-level language which ought to be preserved.

If you're not building a binary interface to something (like hardware or a communications channel that's specified in binary) and you're not working in a hardware-oriented language where those units and specific mappings of bit patterns to values ARE the sole underlying paradigm of your whole type system, then I submit that there is a deficiency in the design of the language.

Conversely, (and here R4RS scheme failed horribly) in such a language when you *are* building an interface to something, the patterns of bits you read or write should get interpreted according to a very specific mapping. The language that abstracts above representation issues for other operations, cannot be used to interface with anything unless the programmer specifies explicitly what mapping of bits to values is to be used for I/O. And this is because you're interfacing to things that *DON'T* have a common language for communication that abstracts above the level of representation, so you can't keep the abstraction barrier above that for the channel itself. A particularly egregious failure of this principle happened in a graphics library written in Scheme. Scheme provided no 'blob' type, and there was no way to specify a bits-to-values mapping on the I/O channels, so the implementor used strings to hold bytes, assuming that the I/O would be done in Ascii + Code page 1386. And of course the code exploded when used on an interface where reading and writing characters was by default done with a different code page or in UTF16.

So... in designing a programming language to operate above the representation abstraction barrier, I would absolutely ensure that bit and byte width of representations entered into the language semantics only when invoked specifically for I/O purposes. If the word "bit" came up in any chapter of the documentation other than the one about how to do I/O, I would be certain that I had made a mistake. If it were used referring to something the programmer actually needs to know to get useful work done, I would be certain that the mistake was egregious.

And this is why I am so completely certain that "uniform vectors" are a mistake in Scheme. They mean the programmer has to care about binary representation for some reason other than I/O.

## Good books on theoretical aspects of type theory when it applies to computer science and languages

I was wondering if anyone could recommend some good books on the more theoretical aspects of type theory as it pertains to computer science and guarantees w.r.t to certain properties as related to language theory. The only books I know of are the two by Pierce but they seem more on the applied side focusing on very specific applications of various theories that in many cases have a long history which aren't really covered by either book. Are there better books covering some of the theory more in depth?

Thanks.

## Some questions concerning P != NP

I am actually kind of perplexed by this. My understanding is that if P != NP there should exist problems in NP that are not in P that aren't NP-complete but is the reverse also true? i.e. should there be a problem whose solution is in NP but not in P but not NP-complete would this imply that P != NP?

For example, it would seem to me at first blush that certain problems do fall in this class if one allows for imperfect knowledge of subroutine code (which occurs in practice). For example password cracking would be one assuming the verification subroutine runs in polynomial time.

1. It is in NP since one can nondeterministically guess all strings and verify each in P time.
2. It is rather straight forward to prove that it takes exp time to get the correct string in the worse case since given any alphabet A of size k there are k^N possible strings to examine with the subroutine verifier. Since from a sort of information theoretical point of view testing one string yields no information about the correct string except that the current string is not the correct string when answered in the negative(i.e. it yields no information whatsoever about whether another even similar string is the correct string or not). One needs k^N unique string tests in the worse case each executing sequentially in polynomial time which isn't in P.

My understanding about this subject is limited however but it would seem that this problem is guaranteed to execute in O(P*exp) on a TM and P time on a NTM and there is no room for improvement on a TM- why doesn't this show that P != NP? It seems like something that must have been considered by many people.

P.S. I asked a CS professor already and he wasn't sure about it since it isn't his specialty. So I thought it might be worth asking on a general forum.

## Best successor to Scheme?

I do not mean to start a completely subjective navel-gazing thread. I mean to learn, "if I loved Scheme when I learned it (and I really did, back in college in 1989), what else could I look into in these modern times?" (apropos the other current Scheme thread.)

If you have thoughts, please mention something like: The language name, the language web site, the bullet point reasons you think it is at all related to where Scheme comes from spiritually, the bullet point reasons you think it is "better" than Scheme, the bullet point cons (if any ha ha!) in the language.

(Or tell me this is a very bad idea for a thread, and delete it...)

Wishing to simultaneously learn and yet avoid any rat-holing flame-wars. :-)

## IEEE Scheme expiring soon

Scheme has an IEEE standard, IEEE 1178-1990, which describes a version of the language slightly later than R4RS (#f and the empty list are definitely different) but not yet R5RS (no syntax-rules, dynamic-wind, or multiple values). That standard was reaffirmed unchanged in 2008, and will come up again for renewal in 2018. What's the Right Thing?

I see three reasonable courses of action:

1) Do the work to make R7RS-small the new edition of IEEE Scheme.

2) Do the (lesser amount of) work to reaffirm IEEE Scheme unchanged for the second time.

3) Do nothing and allow the IEEE standard to expire.

Does anyone still care about having an official, citable standard for Scheme?

(When I brought the question up on #scheme, someone asked what R7RS-small implementations exist. Currently there are Chibi, Chicken (partial), Foment, Gauche, Guile (partial), Husk, Kawa, Larceny, Mosh (partial), Picrin, Sagittarius.)

## SFI Talk: Four the hard way: Computer design and living software

Just a funny talk I found on the Interwebs by Dave Ackley.

SFI Talk: Four the hard way: Computer design and living software

I don't think his ideas are particularly new but it's good to see them stated directly in a talk once.

The end result is something seemingly tangent to what is possible at the moment, scalable hardware with a programming language on top.