Oct 28, 2019 - Unix50

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This past week my employer Bell Labs celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Unix operating system with a big “Unix50” event in the Bell Labs headquarters in Murray-Hill, NJ and the launch of an online coding challenge called The Unix Game.

Unix was invented by Bell Labs researchers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie precisely 50 years ago in the summer of 1969. Their iconic OS has since influenced a large number of other operating systems, not least of which Linux, MacOS and Android which are still based on the same basic principles.

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Jun 21, 2019 - Code Compass

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I’m happy to share some of the work that I have been involved in at Bell Labs over the course of last year: our import2vec model for training good machine representations of software libraries (enabling computers to establish a mathematical degree of similarity between software libraries), and a practical tool built on top of these representations called Code Compass.

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Oct 15, 2018 - Programming Secure Smart Contracts

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Five years ago, I wrote on this blog about a distributed computing platform called Dr. SES (distributed resilient secure ECMAScript). The goal of Dr. SES was to build a secure distributed computing platform harnessing the power of object-capabilities to build smart contracts.

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Jul 22, 2018 - Isolating application sub-components with membranes

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Membranes are a defensive programming pattern used to intermediate between sub-components of an application. The pattern is applicable in any memory-safe programming language, and I explain elsewhere on this blog how they work in JavaScript.

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Oct 27, 2017 - DLS 2017 Most Notable Paper Award for 2007

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Each year the Dynamic Languages Symposium awards the DLS Most Notable Paper award to a paper published 10 years earlier in the symposium proceedings.

This year, our 2007 paper “Mirages: Behavioral Intercession in a Mirror-based Architecture” (link to paper) won the Most Notable Paper award.

The paper explored a new mechanism to virtualize objects in object-oriented programming languages (in particular, in the AmbientTalk programming language which I co-developed with my co-author Stijn Mostinckx as part of my PhD work). This work laid the foundation for my later work on the JavaScript Proxy API together with Mark S. Miller, which was standardized as part of ECMAScript 2015 and is now available in all major browsers.

The award citation reads:

The 2007 DLS paper “Mirages: Behavioral Intercession in a Mirror-based Architecture” combined the ideas of explicit mirrors for reflective introspection and modification with implicit mirrors for behavioral intercession. The work in this paper influenced and inspired the design of proxies in the JavaScript language, where it now has applications in areas such as security, testing, and virtualization of the DOM.

I’m honored to have received this award from the DLS community, which is one of the premier forums to discuss advances in dynamic languages.