Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#21

Post by DonaldFisk » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

Me.

I'm working on Full Metal Jacket, a strongly-typed, visual, pure dataflow language (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html) with its own IDE.

Things have advanced a fair bit since I wrote those pages, and published the recent paper, so I'll add to the tutorials very soon, and announce this in Hacker News. Type definition, macros, and a few other things have been added to the language.

.303 shared-source release approaches, but I don't do deadlines.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, but I have some ideas for future directions, including adding dependent types, running on a multi-core machine with speculative execution, and automatic programming (i.e. user supplies just inputs and outputs). Very long-term ideas involve a developing a variant of the language which enables programs to run backwards, to enable execution on a gated quantum computer.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#22

Post by tehchromic » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:13 PM UTC

bjornsing wrote: post #13

iheartmemcache wrote: post #2

This is a really broad question, about on par with asking "which fashion houses are putting out daring material and what will Dior be making that's popular 30 years from now". Software is just like any other cargo-cult industry where trends rise and fall almost like clockwork. From Rails, to Angular, to React. RE: People/Groups who are researching 'new approaches to programming' - you have the typical universities pu…

> From Rails, to Angular, to React. That's where you lost me. ;) (It's sort of like a physicist claiming force, mass and momentum to be the hottest new research areas for the coming 30 years...)

Don't forget the ether! I hear the ether is posed to make a comeback, big time!!

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#23

Post by ping010pong » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:17 PM UTC

http://urbit.org/docs/theory/whitepaper

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#24

Post by amirmc » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:20 PM UTC

Probabilistic programming might interest you.

e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.00996

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#25

Post by pklausler » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

Looking at hardware trends on servers, in the next ten years I expect more pure functional programming on the CPU (implicitly concurrent, write-once data structures) and more data-parallel array operations being offloaded to GPUs. The CPU language of 2025 is probably something very much like Haskell with a cleaned-up base library, but I'm not sure what the GPU component will look like to the programmer.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#26

Post by surfmike » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:37 PM UTC

CDG (Communications Design Group) at SAP is where Bret Victor and a lot of other people work on research. I think a big focus is changing how we program in the future.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#27

Post by leoc » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:45 PM UTC

msutherl wrote: post #14

lebek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Kay is also running the Communications Design Group: https://github.com/cdglabs

Just to clarify, Alan is only 'running CDG' insofar as he is supporting and representing it as a sister lab to VPRI. The various research groups there are completely autonomous and as far as I can tell not publicly identified.

A lot of the news coverage is claiming that he had a role in recruiting specific people to CDG, and even names some of them (eg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-... ), which would be more than just lending his support even if he's not really running the place. I certainly can't confirm if that's accurate though.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#28

Post by petke » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:46 PM UTC

Personally I think in the next 30 years we will be programming with thesame languages popular today. They will evolve to handle multicore better though. With tasks, async, couruoutines, actors, etc. Before too long we will have a mix of thousands of cores. Gpu, cpu, remote cores. We will have to figure out how to spread our programs across all of them. Well all be doing supercomputing.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#29

Post by lmeyerov » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:49 PM UTC

Program synthesis: see work by Ras Bodik's team at Berkeley (now UW) and descendants in Armando's MIT team and Sumit Gulwani's MSR team.

As a concrete examples making industry waves, see Excel's new Flashfill and Trifacta ETL wrangling product.

Underneath, these use search (ML, SMT, ...) to allow non-tradiotional & sloppy coding: fill in the blanks, program by demonstration, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#30

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 10:51 PM UTC

msutherl wrote: post #14

lebek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Kay is also running the Communications Design Group: https://github.com/cdglabs

Just to clarify, Alan is only 'running CDG' insofar as he is supporting and representing it as a sister lab to VPRI. The various research groups there are completely autonomous and as far as I can tell not publicly identified.

There seem to be two CDG branches: LA with Alex Warth (Jonathan Edwards also), and Bay Area with Bret Victor (Toby is also there). They are both doing really good work.