Another Successful PLDI!

After nearly a week in beautiful Santa Barbara, PLDI is over. The location could not have been more perfect: the weather was spectacular, the wine was delicious, and the Santa Barbara community was warm and receptive to the hundreds of researchers descending upon their town.

Hats off to the following people for making PLDI a great success:

• general chair Chandra Krintz for choosing such a wonderful location and handling many of the logistics of a conference this size
• ACM's Annabel Satin for communicating with hotel staff when issues arose, and for her innumerable other duties. If there's a problem at PLDI, you'll see her somewhere in the periphery dealing with it!
• Student volunteer co-chairs Dan Barowy and Michael Christensen for wrangling all of us student volunteers and using efficient communication channels
• PC chair Emery Berger (and the rest of the PC!) for putting together an excellent program

This year, PLDI had two very interesting keynotes from Ben Zorn and Luiz Barroso that urged our community to look at a variety of interesting problems that could use language-based solutions. Ben's keynote concerned a variety of topics, from handling bugs in the data programs operate on to privacy issues in the Internet of Things, and spawned a number of conference jokes involving malevolent smart forks. Luiz's talk described unique performance challenges involved in warehouse-scale computing, where it is most important to reduce tail latencies. I found a summary of an older version of his talk online.

I attended many research presentations, including all of those mentioned in my pre-PLDI post, and enjoyed the breadth and depth of the program. Since all talks were recorded this year, I can go back and review presentations that I did not quite grasp and watch presentations that I missed! I hope the talks are uploaded soon.

Next year, PLDI will be in Barcelona. I definitely plan to attend!