Semantic subtyping with an SMT Solver

After what seems like a very long time, I'm happy to report that - just in time for the holiday season - the extended version of our ICFP paper is now available (here). Enjoy!

XML vs the web...

According to James Clark, the web is winning. Or rather, JSON is winning.

[Speaking as someone who's spent a long time dealing with XML in programming and query languages, I'm not surprised. XML comes from good intentions, but what was delivered was broken. As Phil Wadler and Jerome Simeon put it:

So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.

]

The joys of SQL

Verity Stob on SQL: here

(I think if you use your favourite search engine you'll find quotes from my database course where I have less than complementary things to say about SQL! These quotes were taken without my knowledge by the students in the audience.)

Shipped!

Yesterday, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2010 (in particularly nice boxes!). I just finished installing it on all my machines - I recommend you do too:-) Amongst many features, you get a nice improvement to C#: dynamic types (as detailed in our forthcoming ECOOP 2010 paper). You also get a whole new language: Visual F#. Congratulations to Don Syme for probably the biggest tech transfer out of our research lab.

(Unlike other companies, Microsoft clearly loves multiple programming languages!)

Design matters!

Please, somebody, start marketing this!

Congratulations Chuck!

MSR's Chuck Thacker has just been awarded the 2009 ACM Turing Award - which is the "Nobel Prize" for Computer Science. This is richly deserved - Chuck essentially built the first machine that we would recognize as a PC (The Xerox Alto) and the first Tablet PC, and many other contributions besides. A worthy winner (and the fourth recipient from MSR!).

Bummer

HD2 Not getting Windows Phone 7 Series OS - Official