#57 Compilers for Privacy-Preserving Computation, Category Theory, and Keeping a Good Rythm in your PhD - Raghav Malik
Raghav Malik, has just defended his PhD on the topic of compilers for privacy-preserving computation, and that's a good chunk of our conversation.
He has also spent some years in grad school going down the rabbit hole to actually learn Category Theory in depth and from first principles, so I was deieing to ask him if category theory is really all that to learn the foundations of PL. In other words, does learning category theory really make you a better PL researcher?
Then, of course, I wouldn’t finish this episode without asking him how he coped with Mental Health during his PhD Journey.
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#56 Property Based Testing and PL Grad School Applications - Francille Zhuang
Francille Zhuang is an undergrad at Purdue University and has been doing research with Benjamin Delaware and Patrick Lafontaine. In this episode we talk about her early research experiences on Property Based Testing, and we go through all the necessary information for applying for graduate school in Programming Languages in the US.
Links
Francille's LinkedIn
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#55 The Death of OO, The Beauty of Scheme, BobKonf, and FunArch - Mike Sperber
Mike Sperber is the CEO of Active Group, a company designed for Counseling, Development and Training in functional programming. He is a co-organizer of Bob Konf and FunArch, the Co-founder of the leading german blog on functional programming. Member of the Editorial Board of the JFP. Part of the R6RS, the 6th revised report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme.
In our conversation we talk about C, Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Scheme and his involvement with the R6RS. His views on mathematics and formal methods as languages, his views on the use of Functional Programming in the Industry, his thoughts of how Object Oriented Programming is dead. Macros, hygienic macros and much more!
We also talk about BobKonf and FunArch as amazing confereces on Functional Programming and their design and archtechture. BobKonf currently has a call for talks open and goes until november 17th.
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Links
Mike's Website
Bob Konf
FunArch
Functional Programming Blog
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#54 The Goal of Science is to Communicate Ideas! - Philip Wadler
Philip Wadler is a well known, celebrated and recognized researcher in the field especially for his unique ability to explain complex ideas in a simple and elegant way. He got his Bachelor in 1977 at Stanford, his Masters in 1979 and his PhD in 1984 both at CMU. In 2023, he was awarded the distinguished honor of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, joining the ranks of scientific greats such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
Wadler describes himself as someone who likes to bring theory into practice, and practice into theory. In this episode, we talk about his prolific research, the story behind Monads and Type Classes, Category Theory and Homotopy Type Theory.
Throughout our conversation, in response to my eagerness to understand the philosophy and method behind his remarkable papers, he repeatedly emphasizes that the whole point of science is clearly communicating ideas so that others can build upon them.
Links
Wadler's Website
Ullman's Advising Students For Success
Grad School Mentorship
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#53 RustBelt, Iris, and the Art of Writing - Derek Dreyer
Derek Dreyer is a professor at the Max Planck Institute, in 2024 he was awarded the ACM Fellowship, in 2017 he got the ACM Sigplan Robin Milner Young Researcher Award. And has participated or lead greatly influential work, such as the RustBelt Project and Iris.
In this episode Derek shares his experience going to Grad School at CMU, how even a great research as himself has fallen pray to the impostor syndrome and how to cope with it. Throughout the conversation he makes beautiful parallels between music and academic papers, and how the work of a researcher is similar to that of an artist an many aspects. He also gives us a few tips about how to become a better academic writer. And of course, we also talked about Rust and the history about formally verifying its type system.
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Links
Derek's Website
POPL '25 PLMW Talk - How to Write Papers so that People Can Read Them