This blog will soon start to conduct and publish interviews with programming languages researchers and implementers. We will talk to a diverse group of people doing a variety of things in a variety of settings.
As a teaser for what’s to come, in this post I’d like to call your attention to the series of interviews carried out in 2018 by Jean Yang, in conjunction with that year’s POPL. It’s called People of Programming Languages. This site has interviews with an interesting cross-section of the POPL community: Active, senior researchers who have been publishing at POPL for decades; researchers publishing prolifically at POPL for the past ten years; and junior students and post-docs just getting started. Here’s the list:
- Danel Ahman, Postdoc, INRIA Paris (now a Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Ljubljana).
- James Bornholt, PhD student, University of Washington (now an Asst Prof at UT Austin and regular contributor to this blog).
- Ezgi Çiçek, PhD student, MPI-SWS and Saarland University (now a Software Engineer at Facebook’s Static Analysis team, Infer).
- Azadeh Farzan, Professor, University of Toronto.
- Matthias Felleisen, Professor, Northeastern University.
- Ralf Jung, PhD student, MPI-SWS and Saarland University.
- Xavier Leroy, Senior Scientist, INRIA.
- Zoe Paraskevopoulou, PhD Student, Princeton University.
- Simon Peyton-Jones, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge.
- Benjamin Pierce, Professor, University of Pennsylvania.
- Thomas Reps, Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
- Nikhil Swamy, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Redmond.
- Stephanie Weirich, Professor, University of Pennsylvania.
- David Walker, Professor, Princeton University.
- Hongseok Yang, Professor, KAIST.
In addition to the interviews themselves, the site includes Jean’s explanation of how the project got off the ground.
The interviews are insightful, inspirational, and a lot of fun. Researchers are real people, too! The great research is the end product, but the motivations and methods are also worth knowing. Thanks to Jean and all of her subjects for taking the time to archive their stories. There is much we can learn from each other. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: These posts are written by individual contributors to share their thoughts on the SIGPLAN blog for the benefit of the community. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal, belong solely to the blog author and do not represent those of ACM SIGPLAN or its parent organization, ACM.
