James Wilcox 
@wilcoxjay@types.pl
assistant teaching professor, university of washington, PL and systems research https://jamesrwilcox.com/
Joined Jan 2022
I'm pretty proud of this anthem my choir sang last week. very cool 16th century English renaissance piece with lots of cross relations. the best we've ever sung it!
a thought I have surprisingly often: "I should buy a second mandola so I can keep one in my office"
for give the STEM poasting™, but one thing I notice with assigning research papers to undergrads at UW is that many of them are surprised to be asked for their opinion about the reading? I guess they think "this is a Published Academic Research Paper, who am I to pass judgment on it?"
I find this viewpoint sort of bizarre, and my limited impression is that exists to a *much* greater extent in the social sciences and the humanities. any ideas on how to teach an "ownership mindset" when it comes to research ideas?
James Wilcox
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Just under a month left to submit to EGRAPHS 2023!
Deadline: Apr 5, 2-6pg abstract, published or in-progress work ok!
You don't wanna miss it, especially with @cfallin's invited talk on e-graphs in the Cranelift compiler!
James Wilcox
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Wooohoooo! SOSP is going annual!! Thanks to everyone that signed the petition that started this whole process! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXKkG7YFs-5lWUwVy-Yk_SBSiqxfl-L2oN6wjVCEOqwJVhIg/viewform
you know how you take your car to the mechanic and it doesn't make the noise?
my distributed systems students present you with the following meme:
James Wilcox
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Super excited to have @cfallin tell us about (a)e-graphs in the Cranelift JIT compiler! You too could give an EGRAPHS 2023 talk, deadline is April 5!
"I'm not *sure* I hope that, but I think I might hope that, you know??"
James Wilcox
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A survey of parser generator usage in major language implementationss: https://notes.eatonphil.com/parser-generators-vs-handwritten-parsers-survey-2021.html
Most have a handwritten parser. GCC and Go moved from generated to handwritten. SQLite and Python <3.10 built their own parser generators!
James Wilcox
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Do folks have favorite fun illustrations of PL concepts? Stuff like:
Tail Call Optimization: The Musical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PX0BV9hGZY
Combinatris (Tetris w/ SKI calculus)
https://dirk.rave.org/combinatris/
wat (surprising default behaviors for script language corner cases)
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
(and note by "mechanical", I don't mean "easy"!! in fact that's why this principle is important. if the checking process is challenging, and students haven't mastered it, then they have no hope of doing the creative/guessing part!)
a classic example of this situation is in program verification, where coming up with a loop invariant requires creativity, but checking it often is mechanical.
in other words, when asking students to solve problems that require creativity, a prerequisite is that they know how to verify that a solution to such a problem is correct.
here's a pedagogical principle for ya:
if you are asking your students to guess, you better teach them how to check
assistant teaching professor, university of washington, PL and systems research https://jamesrwilcox.com/
Joined Jan 2022
