What can programming language research learn from the philosophy of science?

As someone doing programming language research, I find it really interesting to think about how programming language research is done, how it has been done in the past and how it should be done. This kind of questions are usually asked by philosophy of science, but only a few people have discussed this in the context of computing (or even programming languages).

So, my starting point was to look at the classic works in the general philosophy of science and see which of these could tell us something about programming languages.

I wrote an article about some of these ideas and presented it last week at the second symposium on History and Philosophy of Programming. For me, it was amazing to talk with interesting people working on so many great related ideas! Anyway, now that the paper has been published and I did a talk, I should also share it on my blog:

• What can Programming Language Research Learn from the Philosophy of Science?
• Fairly minimalistic slides from my talk at the symposium

One feedback that I got when I submitted the paper to Onward! Essays last year was that the paper uses a lot of philosophy of science terminology. This was partly the point of the paper, but the feedback inspired me to write a more readable overview in a form of blog post. So, if you want to get a quick peek at some of the ideas, you can also read this short blog (and then perhaps go back to the paper)!

BREAKING: Open-source C# 6.0 released

At last, the long wait is finally over! After 4 years of waiting, the fully managed implementation of the C# compiler codenamed "Roslyn" has been finally released. In the recent months, "Roslyn" has been slowly turning into vaporware, but thanks to the recent breakthrough, the team made an enormous progress over the last two months and even implemented a number of new C# 6.0 features.

The C# 6.0 compiler, together with the full source code has been released today!

UPDATE: In case you are reading this article later than on the day when it was published, let me just point out that this was released on 1 April 2014. Just to avoid any disappointments. Have fun ;-).

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