I’m cur­rently hanging out at my gate in Pear­son air­port. In a couple hours I’ll be on my way to Paris and tomor­row morn­ing I’ll catch my con­nect­ing flight to Ams­ter­dam and then I take the train to Utrecht to see Jasna’s sis­ter, Ana, and her hus­band, Andre.

Jasna and I aren’t very good with sep­ar­a­tion, though I think this time went bet­ter than most. It could be that it’s a shorter sep­ar­a­tion this time — five days, in con­trast to Jasna’s recent two-​​month trip — or that we’re too tired from last night’s Hallowe’en party to get as worked up. Maybe we’re just get­ting bet­ter at it, though. It’s not like no tears were shed, but I think we did rel­at­ively well.

Unfor­tu­nately today my cam­era bat­tery decided to crap out on me. The upside to this is Jasna lent me her (very awe­some) DSLR cam­era for the trip. I’ll try to keep pic­tures of blondes down to a min­imum. Mostly I’m excited to see Ana and Andre, but I think they’ll be busy most of the time, so I’ll prob­ably ven­ture into Ams­ter­dam at least once to enter­tain myself. I brought the cam­era cable with me, so watch my photo gal­lery in the next day or two for pic­tures to start appearing.

The con­fer­ence — and my present­a­tion there — I haven’t thought a whole lot about yet. I’ll have to dis­ap­pear to Eind­hoven, which I think is only about half an hour from Utrecht — but then again maybe everything’s half an hour away from everything in the Neth­er­lands, who knows — and see what’s going on there. I’m fairly excited to see what FOPARA ends up being like since this is the first year the workshop’s being done. I’m espe­cially excited to see the Hume pro­ject people, like Kevin Ham­mond, since I’ve never met any.

I should say there’s still a lot of work that’s going on behind the scenes, work even on what I’m going to present to FOPARA. While I was in Cal­gary we decided to put in a new typ­ing sys­tem based on bunched logics which deals eleg­antly with a lot of the prob­lems with peeks that we’ve been sort­ing out in Pola, plus some new features.

I finally got per­suaded into doing a NaNoWriMo. For those who don’t speak Inter­net hip­ster, this is just a fancy way of say­ing I got per­suaded into writ­ing my own novel, spe­cific­ally a 50000-​​word novel within the month of November.

It may seem like a silly idea con­sid­er­ing I have a lot of work to do, not to men­tion a con­fer­ence to go to at the end of this week. Doing 1667 words a day isn’t really that bad, though, con­sid­er­ing writ­ing comes pretty eas­ily for me. I prob­ably write more than that each day just in emails. Whether I can write any­thing good seems to be entirely beside the point: NaNoWriMo is about noth­ing if not quant­ity over quality.

Any­way I’m sud­denly real­iz­ing how ser­i­ously people take this NaNoWriMo busi­ness. (more…)

My visit this week to Cal­gary to work with Brian and Robin is com­ing to an end and has def­in­itely paid off again. We have another day at least of work ahead of us, but prob­ably not much more real work will get done by then since we still have the FOPARA paper to fin­ish up and get cam­era ready. But, just in the past couple of days we’ve already made tre­mend­ous pro­gress in improv­ing and sta­bil­iz­ing the lan­guage. It won’t be too much longer before “core Pola” is finalized.

I should say there was one inter­est­ing res­ult that Brian told me about. The peek con­struct is a unique con­struct to the lan­guage, which allows one to, under some restric­tions, break affine­ness, i.e., allows one to ref­er­ence a vari­able mul­tiple times to give the pro­gram­mer more express­ive­ness. It’s a del­ic­ate busi­ness since affine­ness is what keeps Pola pro­grams polynomial-​​time, par­tic­u­larly in the con­text of recur­sion. As it turns out, if you remove the recursion-​​symbol restric­tions on peeks — allow­ing recur­sion within the con­di­tion of a peek—but keep the other restric­tions on peeks, you exactly cap­ture PSPACE! We demon­strated this by chan­ging just a couple lines of code, allow­ing recur­sion, and cod­ing up QSAT to play with. (more…)