simondobson.org

Many lan­guages have an under­ly­ing vir­tual machine (VM) to provide a more port­able and con­veni­ent sub­strate for com­pil­a­tion or inter­pret­a­tion. For lan­guage research it’s use­ful to be able to gen­er­ate cus­tom VMs and other lan­guage tools for dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Which raises the ques­tion: what’s the appro­pri­ate lan­guage for writ­ing exper­i­mental languages?

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Tech­no­logy always advances, and in most areas the rate of change is also increas­ing all the time. But there are some areas where tech­no­lo­gical changes either hap­pen only slowly, or even go into reverse. Not some­thing we’re used to in com­puter sci­ence, but it’s a fea­ture of sensor net­work pro­gram­ming: what are the chal­lenges that tech­no­logy won’t solve for us?

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