My first day at Penn, the Schuylkill flooded 16ft because of Hurricane Ida, and classes were cancelled. I'm starting my new job on Monday, and so of course New York is expecting the largest blizzard in over a decade

The next iteration of NJPLS will be held at the University of Pennsylvania on 22 May 2026! If you'd like to attend or submit a talk proposal, check out the website for details: njpls.org/may2026.html

Seems like a good time as any to say I'm: (1) moving to New York next week, where I'll: (2) be writing OxCaml at Jane Street! Excited to start the next thing :)

Joe Cutler@alphaconvert.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Successfully defended my dissertation today. Now Dr. Joe!

Successfully defended my dissertation today. Now Dr. Joe!

Still OCaml

Patrick@pck.rocks · 6mo ago

C++ => Rust C => Zig Java => Go OCaml => ??? Who's building my kick ass modern-tooling high performance ML ecosystem? Is the answer Roc? It's starting to feel like vaporware.

Hey, I'm looking for speakers at DC Systems for this year! Let me know if you, or anyone you know would enjoy giving a talk to an extremely nice and curious audience!

It’s called ‘vs code’ because the code is an enemy you are fighting

also, Applicative usually being defined in terms of (<*>) and not liftA2 was so incredibly damaging.

They’re killing people as a twitter joke. It’s depraved. Can’t let yourself lose the capacity to be appalled and disgusted and outraged by this.

Yashar Ali 🐘@yasharali.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announces another boat strike in response to a request/wish from Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet.

Considering hiding some ancient PL twitter memes deep in my dissertation

Every time I have something important to do, I start a new side project. Instead of writing my dissertation, I spent the last few days optimizing an OxCaml implementation of the One Billion Row Challenge (1brc). I'd much rather write about this!! Oh well, maybe after I'm done dissertating.

Is there ever a reason to explicitly copy a file into memory instead of mmapping it if you don't plan to write it?

I have also experienced this. When it works well (not always), Claude code can free me up to think mostly about the bits of the work I'm interested in.

dan@danabra.mov · 10mo ago

i’m less concerned about this now. i experienced deep flow vibecoding yesterday. in some ways it was actually deeper than manual coding because (when it worked well) i was able to explore ideas and directions that would normally take me days (due to lack of domain knowledge, boilerplate etc)

I will also be at ICFP/SPLASH in Singapore! Similarly excited to see everyone (especially Harry)

Harry Goldstein@harrisongoldste.in · 10mo ago

I'll be at ICFP/SPLASH in Singapore, starting in a little over a week! Really looking forward to seeing everyone.

I'm very excited about this new movie from Kathryn Bigelow. More great movies about how terrifying nukes are can only be a good thing. Side-bonus: I expect more WIRED videos featuring @wellerstein.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wpw...

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE | Official Trailer | Netflix

YouTube video by Netflix

youtube.com

Have you been considering hosting a local PL meetup? Need a good place to start? Check out the PL Perspectives post that I wrote with Michael Greenberg and Noam Zilberstein! blog.sigplan.org/2025/09/16/think-globally-discuss-pl-locally/

Think Globally, Discuss PL Locally

In-person meetings are hugely beneficial for academic research; they provide a venue to collaborate and connect, making our community more connected and facilitating the exchange of ideas. In addit…

blog.sigplan.org

Upstate NY folks: Cornell will be hosting Upstate PL (www.cs.cornell.edu/upstate-pl/) on Thursday, August 28th. You should come if you're in the area! Talk proposals are due August 4th, registration closes August 18th.

Some more exciting news! This year we had not one, but two(!) dissertations receiving the SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award at PLDI! The awardees are: Harrison Goldstein from the University of Pennsylvania and Rachit Nigam from Cornell University. More info ⬇️

Reality has a well-known liberal bias

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · last yr.

A big AI question is why, as LLMs get bigger, their values seem to increasingly converge on the same preferences, this holds for Musk’s Grok & China’s DeepSeek, too. “These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, with broad implications” arxiv.org/abs/2502.08640

Headed to NYC for the summer! If you're in town and want to hang out, let me know!

Going to New York on Saturday morning. Tomorrow will be spent feverishly packing and being a little ball of excitement

Passed my proposal defense! Now a PhD candidate, I guess.

There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university. University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

Prof Christina Pagel@chrischirp.bsky.social · last yr.

A must read

Wow, they made Cheyenne Mountain from the hit 1983 thriller WarGames starting Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick into a real place!

It’s genuinely embarrassing that people keep falling for these “AI explains the hidden secrets of its programming” posts. Grok is not sentient, it cannot explain what it’s doing and why.

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · last yr.

An X USER, to Grok: “Why are you launching into conversations about white genocide, unprompted?” 🤡

On the way back to Philly after an exhausting week in NYC. One week at home, then to Colorado for my brother’s college graduation. Then back to Philly to propose my thesis, then to NYC for the summer!

If you are considering applying for a PhD this Fall, please get in touch. I’m looking for students who are interested in PL, SE, and/or HCI — and ideally all three! You can find more information about me and my work on my website: harrisongoldste.in

Harrison Goldstein

harrisongoldste.in

I'm incredibly excited to announce that I've accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo! The PL/SE group at UB is already really impressive, and I am honored to be part of its continued growth