Seminar meeting,  November 8 ,2010

Speaker: Yishai Feldman
 
Title:  What Do We Know About Programming? (SKY 2010 invited talk)

Abstract:      
There  are countless books and courses about programming.  But in order to create   development,   reengineering,   and  transformation   tools,  much  deeper knowledge  is  required. Current  tools  handle  syntactic issues quite well, but have a sketchy  understanding  of  program  semantics. As a result, programming  is still  labor-intensive, relying heavily on the knowledge stored in people’s minds.

Procedural  knowledge  about  programming languages is embodied inside  the  compilers for those languages.  However, that form of  knowledge cannot be used to reason about  programs in general, and is therefore of little use in development and reengineering   tools.    The  formalization  of  the  required knowledge  is still very much an open problem.  I will describe the  Plan  Calculus  and its extensions as a representation for programming  knowledge,  as well as several tools based on this representation, some of which were used in large commercial projects.


Speaker: Amiram Yehudai

Title: Report on Splash 2010
 including 
Manifesto: a New Educational Programming Language