Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2012 13:05:35 +0100 Subject: PEMs this week: 4 Dec (TOMORROW!): Frank Tip; 7 Dec (Friday): Raphael Poss From: Vadim Zaytsev To: PEM Cc: Frank Tip, "Raphael 'kena' Poss" Dear environmentalists, This is a reminder that Frank Tip is visiting us from University of Waterloo (his affiliation was stated incorrectly in the previous announcement — sorry for that!). Tomorrow (on Tuesday!) he will give a PEM Colloquium presentation at the usual time (11:00) in the usual place (CWI, L017). Later this week we will have a regular PEM Colloquium presentation on Friday as usual. It will be given by Raphael Poss from the Computer Systems Architecture research group at the UvA, where he recently received his PhD degree in hardware microthreading. Speaker names for the next upcoming PEM talks can be found in the Google Calendar at http://event.cwi.nl/pem/calendar.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 7 December 2012 Time: 11:00-12:00 Room: L017 Speaker: Raphael Poss (Universiteit van Amsterdam) Title: Don't forget the hardware! Abstract: see below ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Don't forget the hardware! In the last twenty years, programming environments have gone to great extents to erase the physical reality from the mind of the software programmer. Abstractions that simplify the mental models of hardware are useful in that they allow the programmer to concentrate on more important tasks, such as decomposing problems, expressing them in exact semantics, and proving that implementation matches specification. The rising levels of abstraction has induced a quest for absolutely pure languages where programmers can work entirely in the world of mathematical symbols, devoid of any constraint from the real world, and request the machine to to the “dirty work” of mapping the language to an actual implementation. In this talk, I will present how I came to believe that this quest is misdirected, that the programming activity cannot be carried out at all without some human intuition about concrete hardware, and therefore that the concept of “pure functional languages” is both disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. The argument is based on my growing realization that compositional hardware virtualization, a notion I will describe, is the fundamental abstraction manipulated by all programmers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- http://event.cwi.nl/pem/calendar.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Yours, Vadim.