All is Quiet on the Western Front

Some ups, some downs.

• My reviews of the OOPSLA paper were as expected. The first reviewer summed it up best: if it was a journal submission, he/she would like to accept it but have it rewritten. Incomprehensible in parts, but neat. OTOH, someone who looked over my draft and works in the web space, but does not do formal academic stuff, said it was the first PL paper he read in awhile that he 'got'. Unfortunately, I must write for the program committee. Presenting my work in a formal manner as a extension for reactivity of a gradually typed lambda calculus with mutation would be clearer for them than incrementally building up examples of data binding from plain old JavaScript and HTML, with the latter presentation style actually having a shot at being accessible to the practicing developer. Such is life.
• I'm getting really excited about examining what it means to search and to link. I will keep mum about that work, publicly, until I have sufficient momentum. In preparation for stage 1 of this, I have done the SSA conversion, added logging, and have the basic bisimulation of programs set up. Raluca already has event simulation and generation setup, so that means we are about ready to perform partial order reduction and introduce concolic execution. From there, I parallelize the heck out of it [17 days to go - perhaps we should skip concolic execution for now and just focus on reduction!] From there, say near the end of May, we'll be in a position to start innovating. I started doing reading for stage 2 as part of my semantics course, though luckily both stages 1 and 2 can extend indefinitely long, and in parallel.
• On the topic of parallelism, I need to think of some sort of parallel language doodad. JavaScript extended with implicitly parallel reactivity might be the way to go. I'm not sure that it'll have a good story wrt the browser (hardware resource partitioning / hierarchical scheduling), but we'll see.

The summer should be fun. A bunch of us are being temporarily moved to the Woz lounge due to construction of our new lab space, but, there's some silver lining: a grill is right outside of the lounge, right there on the balcony! Daily summer BBQ... mmm...