Efficient Local Search for Nonlinear Real Arithmetic
Abstract elided by the publisher.
26,098 papers · page 146 of 1,305
Model-Guided Synthesis for LTL over Finite Traces
Abstract elided by the publisher.
The Linguistics of Programming
Research in programming languages and software engineering are broadly concerned with the study of aspects of computer programs: their syntactic structure, the relationship between form and meaning (semantics), empirical properties of how they are constructed and deployed, and mo…
Dialogues on Natural Code
This essay, based on a series of discussions between the authors, is a loosely edited collage in which we work to flesh out our shared interests in non-traditional machines and coding mechanisms. We primarily focused on the idea that all human language can usefully be viewed in p…
Redressing the Balance: A Yin-Yang Perspective on Information Technology
Information is an essential aspect of how we interact with the world around us. We acquire information and then integrate it to build knowledge, understanding, and trust, which in turn serve in preparing actions. Information technology (IT) is supposed to support all these phases…
A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design
Two critical and interrelated questions regarding the design and study of programming languages are: 1) What does it mean to design a programming language? and 2) Why does minimal demographic diversity persist in the programming language community? In this paper, we present femin…
(Programs), Proofs and Refutations (and Tests and Mutants)
This essay consists of an imaginary discussion among a group of students after a computer science class, that presents some problems of (and partial solutions to) fundamental issues of program correctness.
A New Cognitive Perspective on Simplicity in System and Product Design
What is simple? How can we make simple things? Simplicity seems easy to grasp but is surprisingly difficult to explain. “We know it when we see it”, but we don’t know how to describe it. This essay reflects on a number of observations about simplicity and complexity. It invites a…
Programming Languages for the Future of Design Computation
Design Computation is the use of programming in the design of physical systems such as buildings and infrastructure. This involves embedding both general-purpose textual languages and domain-specific visual languages within geometry modelling and engineering applications in the c…
The Hidden Program State Hurts Everyone
While visual scaffolding, live programming, and direct manipulation of the program state are considered useful programming paradigms for novices, they might not always offer the same benefits to experienced software developers. In this essay, we will use chess as a proxy for expl…
Use Site Checking Considered Harmful
Static type checking aims to detect nonsensical operations based on their domains at compile time. While its benefits no longer need to be argued, it comes with expressiveness limitations that can only be lifted at the expense of complexity. This problem is particularly antitheti…
Discovering Your Software Umwelt
We apply the biological-behavioral concept of an umwelt, which is how an organism perceives and acts within its environment, to the practice of software development. By writing narrative descriptions of our own software umwelts and iteratively discussing and analyzing them, we de…
tl;dr: Chill, y’all: AI Will Not Devour SE
Social media provide a steady diet of dire warnings that artificial intelligence (AI) will make software engineering (SE) irrelevant or obsolete. To the contrary, the engineering discipline of software is rich and robust; it encompasses the full scope of software design, developm…
Moldable Exceptions
Debugging is hard. Interactive debuggers are mostly the same. They show you a stack, a way to sample the state of the stack, and, if the debugger is live, a way to step through execution. The standard interactive debugger for a general-purpose programming language provided by a m…
Reclaiming the Unexplored in Hybrid Visual Programming
Programming languages have been trapped in a world of linear textual representations fundamentally unchanged for half a century. Even systems pushing beyond these forms — visual languages, projectional language workbenches, and end-user programming tools — largely ape the strictu…
Active DSU: Dynamic Software Updates for Active Functions
Dynamic Software Updating (DSU) is a technique for updating programs without restarting them. It is useful in systems that provide live programming or in system with high availability needs. As a common limitation, existing DSU systems cannot update active functions. Hence, they …
Source-Level Debugging of Compiler-Optimised Code: Ill-Posed, but Not Impossible
Debuggability and optimisation are traditionally regarded as in fundamental tension. This paper disputes that idea, arguing instead that it is possible to compile programs such that they are both fully source-level-debuggable and fully optimised, and that the essential problem to…
The Meerkat Vision: Language Support for Live, Scalable, Reactive Web Apps
The reactive programming paradigm has become ubiquitous for modern web and mobile app development. But despite its many benefits, today reactive programming is limited to data updates within the client, leaving to the programmer the tedious and error-prone tasks of managing updat…
Talking to Objects in Natural Language: Toward Semantic Tools for Exploratory Programming
In exploratory programming, programmers often face a semantic gap between their high-level understanding and the low-level interfaces available for interacting with objects in a system. That is, technical object structure and behavior need to be interpreted as abstract domain con…
Software Engineering Methods for AI-Driven Deductive Legal Reasoning
The recent proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has opened up new frontiers in computational law. An exciting area of development is the use of AI to automate the deductive rule-based reasoning inhe…