Back from PLDI

This is somewhat belated, but I recently (sort of) returned from a trip to Portland to attend PLDI, where I gave a talk entitled "Peer-to-peer Affine Commitment Using Bitcoin", or, more whimsically, "Massively Multiplayer Online Linear Logic". I really enjoyed the opportunity to present this work and discuss it with people; people seemed to find it very intriguing, if perhaps a little silly.

I really enjoyed the chance to talk to people about their work, and to catch up with and make new friends from other parts of the PL community.

Some of the talks I found most interesting were:

•  "Automatically Improving Accuracy for Floating Point Expressions"; a very well delievered talk about automatically implementing numerical methods transformations on floating point computations
•  "Verifying Read-Copy-Update in a Logic for Weak Memory"
•  "Composing Concurrency Control"
•  "A Formal C Memory Model Supporting Integer-Pointer Casts"; this work is near and dear to me because I am also working on designing an alternative for a problematic part of the C/C++ spec. The particular problem even has a similar root cause: an unfortunate reliance on syntactic data dependence to define semantic behavior.
•  "Profile-Guided Meta-Programming"
•  "Synthesizing Data Structure Transformations from Input-Output Examples" and "Type-and-Example-Directed Program Synthesis"; I'm a huge sucker for example based program synthesis even though I have yet to be convinced that it is actually useful