Engelbart’s demo in 1968 put forth compelling visions for personal computing that led to almost 30 years of innovation. Can we do the same for programming languages today? This presentation introduces several new PL technologies to this end. Type-less eliminates most type annotations from object-oriented code so programmers can get rich code completion with much less overhead. Glitch manages state and time like a garbage collector manages memory to achieve React-style reactivity that also applies to side effects and multi-core executions! Glitch can also update executing programs according to live code edits, allowing for a rich live programming experience. Together, Type-less and Glitch lead to a novel feedback-rich programmer experience that is demonstrated in the presentation.

Sean Mcdirmid
Researcher
Microsoft Research Asia
location_on United States
Member since 3 years
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Sean Mcdirmid
Specialises In (based on submitted proposals)
I am a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia who does unconventional programming language and environment research, including design, live programming, advanced code completion, and how we can program with touch. Before working at Microsoft, I obtained my PhD from the University of Utah and my BS from the University of Washington, with a post doc at EPFL working on Scala and the Scala IDE with Martin Odersky.