| SIGPLAN Blog

Synthesizing Neurosymbolic Programs

by Swarat Chaudhuri on Apr 15, 2020 | Tags: machine learning, program synthesis, science

We discuss the emerging problem of automatically synthesizing neurosymbolic programs, or programs that blend together neural networks and high-level code.

People of Programming Languages

by Michael Hicks on Apr 1, 2020 | Tags: history

Jean Yang interviews 15 programming languages researchers about their work, methods, motivations, and history.

Homoiconicity, Lisp, and Program Synthesis

by Rajesh Jayaprakash on Mar 25, 2020 | Tags: functional programming, lisp, program synthesis

Working through a programming exercise, we see that Lisp’s “Code is data” philosophy is a natural enabler for program synthesis.

Go Huge or Go Home: POPL’19 Most Influential Paper Retrospective

by Cristiano Calcagno, Dino Distefano, Peter O'Hearn and Hongseok Yang on Mar 3, 2020 | Tags: MIP award, separation logic, shape analysis, static analysis

The authors of POPL’s 2019 most influential paper reflect on lessons learned: (i) in research, ask daring questions far beyond current capabilities; (ii) develop compositional techniques, which confer important benefits that increase impact; (iii) work in PL theory: now is a great time for it!

POPL 2020 in Review

by Lars Birkedal, Michael Hicks, and Brigitte Pientka on Feb 19, 2020 | Tags: computer security, formal verification, functional programming, machine learning, program analysis, program synthesis, semantic models

POPL is the premiere conference on the theoretical foundations of programming languages. The PC Chair, General Chair, and Steering Committee Chair of POPL 2020 review this year’s event.

From Programs to Deep Models – Part 2

by Eran Yahav on Feb 12, 2020 | Tags: machine learning, neural networks, programming

The wealth of code now available on-line is fertile ground to enable machine learning to be applied to programming tasks. This post is the second in a series on this topic, focusing on the tasks of semantically labeling and captioning code.

The First PLanQC in the Road to Quantum Programming

by Robert Rand and Michael Hicks on Feb 6, 2020 | Tags: compilers, formal verification, language design, program synthesis, quantum computing, type systems

As quantum computers become more practical, there is a rich opportunity to advance the development of tools to assist in the process of programming them, both now and in the future. To encourage more PL-minded researchers to work in this exciting new area, we established the Workshop on Programming Languages for Quantum Computing (PLanQC).