Turing award winner and programming language trailblazer, Robin Milner, who recently passed away, has a cover story in the latest Communications of the ACM.
A man of modest background and quiet brilliance, Milner made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of verification, programming languages, and concurrency. He was born in 1934 near Plymouth, England, and won [...]
From Edmund Robinson:
I am very sorry to inform you that Peter Landin died yesterday of natural causes.
For those members who are several generations away from Peter’s early contributions, he was one of the major figures in the UK at the time that Computer Science was beginning to establish itself as a discipline. Some of his [...]
Unrealistic and unreasonable aspirations almost always lead to conflict.
YouTube video, which is in five parts [1,2,3,4,5].
If you wanted to learn about formalizing PL metatheory, you’d be hard pressed to find better teachers than Bob Harper or Stephanie Weirich. And if you wanted to reason about programs with ACL2, Pete Manolios is your man. Unfortunately for you, these folks teach at geographically diverse universities (not to mention your SAT [...]
All of computation boils down to the following,
,
a universal Turing machine with 2 states and 3 symbols (the symbols are represented as colors and the states as arrows in the graphic). It is the world’s smallest universal TM. The machine was discovered (invented?) by Stephen Wolfram and proved universal last year by [...]