OOPSLA’25

Attending ICFP and OOPSLA 2025 was definitely an experience. There’s so much to learn out there and it can be overwhelming - makes me feel like there’s really not enough time to learn all the things I would like to learn ☹️

Satnam Singh kicked of ICFP with a keynote on functional languages for hardware verification, which was incredibly interesting (especially after all the previous conversations at HASE). Verilog, VHDL, architectures seem to me so far from the questions type theory seems to be interested in, but they are in fact pretty close. Or at least have some shared interests. The modular way of thinking functional programming imposes is similar to what computer architects and designers do, especially when we want to model a component thinking about what it outputs depending on which inputs. (yes, I continue to not understand monads, yes I’m still in the a process lol)

ICFP works give interpretations of the world in terms of more-or-less-abstract nonsense that are very fascinating. Seeing how much abstract nonsense exists and can be used to model things that we use every day gave me insight on how much the perspective we have on a problem shapes the kind of solution we find. And how much a different perspective can enable the “discovery” process. It’s the way we talk and think about things that gives shape to what we can do with the things.

On this note, chatting with Satnam made me realize how much abstract nonsense and hardware verification need each other - despite being so different! There’s a lot of cool maths out there that can help us making hardware verification better, and it’s important to bridge these two sides of the spectrum (yes, monads too). Coinduction is my favorite example: we can talk about it in categorical and abstract terms and at the same time we can use it to model sequential logics in circuits and even more complex hardware such as dataflow.

women in pl dinner

I honestly used to be skeptical about this kind of events but ended up enjoy this particular one so much! It sounds super cliche to say that I got to chat with inspiring women and role-models but that was so true. I spent some time discussing some recent questions I am trying to answer about modelling latency-insensitive designs - and received a lot of pointers to tools, papers, theories that I never thought would fit (but they seem to). Even regexes, my first academic love, unsuspectedly came back in a totally new shape and with a totally new role. Special thanks to Yahui for the inspiring regex and ltl conversations! It was so motivating to see these amazing women and talk about maths and computer science, I got inspiration for works I thought were stuck … and made friends.

more or less random collection of papers/topics/things

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