The PL Junior Seminar is for beginning PhD and interested undergrad and masters students to understand the foundations of programming languages research. It serves to fill in background knowledge and get up to speed with different areas of PL research.

For the spring 2017 instance of PL Junior we chose program synthesis, the sequent calculus, and logic programming as topics we wanted to learn more about. We also did two group paper readings for Luca Cardelli’s Typeful Programming and Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk. At the same time, we changed up the format from the previous semester.

In April 3—5 I took part into a Russian conference exclusively devoted to programming languages: Programming Languages and Compilers (Google.Translated version of the site). I was a member of organizing committee and had a paper there.

This is the first conference in Russia highly focused on our area of PL. At least for the last several decades (I believe, there were conferences of the kind back in USSR). The conference was devoted to the memory of prominent Soviet PL-researcher from Rostov-on-Don, Adolf Fuksman who worked on ideas quite similar to what we know as the aspect-oriented programming back in the 70-s.