ECOOP 2016

Full disclosure: This blog post is sponsored and required by the National Science Foundation (NSF): The NSF! Funding SCIENCE! since 1683 or whenever.

TLDR

I’m going to ECOOP to see a part of the PL community I wouldn’t normally see, talk to people that I wouldn’t normally talk to, attend the co-located summer school, and figure out what I want to do with my (academic) life. If you want to know why I might do those things, read a little about me.

The long story

On Sunday, I am heading to ECOOP. I have never been to ECOOP, the conference is a little outside of my specialty, I do not know anyone there, and I do not even have a paper or talk at one of the workshops. However, a few weeks ago I ignored an email from one of the mailing lists that said there was some NSF funding that students should apply for. Then I saw an email from Jan Vitek on a local mailing list saying students should really apply for this funding and get to go to Rome.

“Huh”, I thought to myself, “I wonder what’s interesting in Rome”. I went to the ECOOP program and started looking around.

The Curry On program looks interesting. This co-located conference should help me understand how PL applies to industry problems. Unfortunately, I’m going to miss most or all the first day. But the talk I’m most interested in is the final keynote, “Building an Open Source Research Lab”; hopefully this will give me some insights on this industry vs academia problem I have been struggling with.

There is also a summer school. While the history of typed and untyped languages looks fascinating, I’m going to have to skip part of it to learn about type specialization of JavaScript programs; I prove things on type-preserving compilation and I want to see more work that uses types for optimizations. Next up, the lecture on “Building a Research Program for Scripting Languages” should help me better understand what an academic career will look like, and give me some idea of how to be a good academic. Then I’m going to learn how to build a JIT compiler for free, because despite being a compilers expert, I don’t know anything about JIT compilers. Finally, I’m going to learn a little about experimental evaluation; I normally do theory and proofs, but I imagine one day I might need to measure something.

Unfortunately, the summer school is in parallel with most of the conference talks, so it’s going to be tough to decide how much of the summer school to miss in order to see new research.

“Yeah”, I thought after much consideration, “I guess there are some interesting things to see in Rome”. I’m a little concerned about the accommodations and venue though; I understand that a lot of the architecture in Rome is very old.