[Crib-list] broadcast (fwd)

[Shirley Entzminger]

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*PhD Candidate: *Jeff Bezanson

*Thesis Supervisor:* Prof. Alan Edelman

*Thesis Committee:* Prof. Steven Johnson, Prof. Saman Amarasinghe, Prof.
Gerry Sussman


*Title:*  Abstraction in Technical Comptuing


*Date:* Wednesday May 13, 2015
*Time: 1pm*

*Location: *MIT campus, 32-D463

*Abstract: *

Array-based programming environments are popular for scientific and

technical computing. These systems consist of built-in function libraries
paired with high-level languages for interaction. Although the libraries
perform well, it is widely believed that scripting in these languages is
necessarily slow, and that only heroic feats of engineering can at best
partially ameliorate this problem.


This thesis argues that what is really needed is a more coherent

structure for this functionality. To find one, we must ask what technical
computing is really about. This thesis suggests that this kind of
programming is characterized by an emphasis on operator complexity and code
specialization, and that a language can be designed to  better fit these
requirements.


The key idea is to integrate code \emph{selection} with code
\emph{specialization},

using generic functions and data-flow type inference. Systems like these
can suffer from inefficient compilation, or from uncertainty about what to
specialize on. We show that sufficiently powerful type-based dispatch
addresses these problems.

The resulting language, Julia, achieves a Quine-style ``explication by
elimination'' of many of the productive features technical computing users
expect.