Two weeks ago, I attended the first Programming Language Implementation Summer School, held in beautiful Bertinoro, Italy.

The goal of PLISS was “to prepare early graduate students and advanced undergraduates for research in the field,” and I think it successfully accomplished that. There were many talks in a variety of areas, such as just-in-time compilers, garbage collection, static analysis, and distributed systems. But PLISS was more than just a series of talks: PLISS provided an environment for interacting with other students as well as senior researchers.