Sliding in the snow, January 18, 2012

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this much snow. Definitely an experience.

We’ll see how I feel about the snow tomorrow. Fortunately, my manager is great and has already said we could all work from home if necessary. I do have a meeting, though, that I don’t want to miss.

I got to see Corky, Vivek and Vincent again, my doctoral advisor and two of my collaborators. I ran into a bunch of people I had met before, like Matthew Flatt, Eelco Visser, Michael Ernst, and Eugene Wallingford, but Igor Peshansky was one of the few people who seemed to recognize me as well. Thanks, and that’s just the way it goes for folks like me.

Vivek and Vincent did a great job with our DrHJ demonstration. Of the other presentations that I watched, I think PREFAIL impressed me the most. That was really good work. I liked the idea of the DSL to test languages and wish I’d had something like that for my work on Mint. And Zef Hemel’s mobl language demo was just damn cool.

I’m glad that I got to go, and I wish I had had more time, time to stay and be involved. I have more interests and responsibilities now, but I enjoy keeping in touch.

Here are some pictures:

Portland from the top of the Hilton, where the Educators' Symposium was held.

Turing Award-winner Ivan Sutherland speaking.

PREFAIL talk by Pallavi Joshi, UC Berkeley.

PREFAIL Talk, finishing slide.

Integrated Language Definition Testing Talk by Lennart Kats, Delft University of Technology

Integrated Language Definition Testing, example slide.

Some more numbers: The source code for my dissertation project has 35,979 lines with 136,951 words. At 30 lines per page, that would be 1,200 pages; but source code lines rarely fill the whole width of the page. At 250 words per page, that would be 548 pages; but wordsInProgramsAreOftenVeryLong.

It’s somewhere in between. But it’s also been written over the course of seven years.

70 minutes.

When someone complained that 80 degrees is kind of warm, and that summer already begins earlier, they checked for 75 degrees F (24 C). How much time?

18 hours. Not even a full day.

But today definitely is summer. All of Seattle was at Alki Beach, it seemed. It looked like the Playa della Something in Mexico or Spain. I ran 3.5 miles slalom around people, but I must have done something to my left foot, because my ankle hurt pretty badly. And I mean that, because running 3.5 miles a day is a piece of cake by now.

Alki Beach in July 2011. Same amount of Space Needle, many more women in bikinis.

Passed My Defense

The comments were mainly about the lack of an interesting, impressive demo that actually requires the cloud and that cannot just be run on one machine. That is a very valid point, but one has to keep in mind that the class was very small, and there was quite a bit of learning and programming involved for a group of four students.

All four of them say that they learned a lot, and that even their interviewing skills improved because of their experience in COMP 410. I think that alone probably makes the class already worthwhile. I’m definitely glad I was able to be a part of it.

Some (blurry) pictures of the students’ presentation. I noticed it was recorded on video. I’ll try to find out where that video can be accessed.

Eddy and I presented a tutorial on DSL implementation in Mint. Of course, I don’t have a picture of that, but Eelco might. But here’s Sukyoung Ryu presenting her tutorial on Fortress.

Sukyoung Ryu's GPCE 2010 Tutorial on Fortress

The auditorium for GPCE was nice, but it didn’t have power outlets. After 10 years in Texas, I guess that’s how I generally feel about Europe: quaint, a bit cramped and underpowered ;-)

GPCE Auditorium in Eindhoven

Also very European: Train, bike, landscape with canals.

Train, bike, landscape with canals

Some more pictures from the trip:

Eindhoven train station, for a quick escape

Landscape from the train

Ready to leave Amsterdam-Schiphol airport

And here are some more pictures that Eddy took. Proof that I exist!

At the Amsterdam-Schiphol airport train station

"Looking very European" with my scarf

Rice Grad/Undergrad Research Mixer Java PLT Poster

Rice Grad/Undergrad Research Mixer

The Central Quad started to fill up a little after 6 PM, and I had interested students standing by my poster and asking questions for about an hour. I was able to do some good advertisement for computer science in general and the programming languages group in particular. I think making DrJava a centerpiece of several research projects, which Corky and I have begun to do, is a good strategy. I told students they can work on DrJava and use COMP 402 to fulfill their BS CAP requirement and get involved in Habanero Java, for example, if they are interested in parallel programming.

Hopefully we’ll have some undergraduates in our production programming class next semester, or students interested in independent study.

I think I also have a dysnumeric mail man, though. So maybe the DPS mailed it, but someone else received it.

Update

The Public Information Office of the Texas DPS actually read my halfhearted complaint and got in touch with me. I had already been talking to someone in the Drivers License Office for weeks, so I’m grateful for this gesture. Maybe this get me my license a bit faster.

Update

I finally received my drivers license. Thanks for everyone at the Texas DPS who helped tracking it down.

Renewed Texas Drivers License, Received after 91 Days

Really. This is what me having a good time looks like. And that’s not jealousy on my face.

Fail number 1: Absolutely no place to park my bike. This has been pretty much the case ever since the undergrads have been back. Rice built two new colleges right next to the building I work in, but didn’t consider what an increased resident population would do to bike rack space: The undergrads, of course, store their bikes semi-permanently on the bike racks that we need to commute.

This is what the bike racks looked like shortly after 9 AM this morning:

Overfull Duncan Hall Bike Rack, 9:15 AM

I have been lobbying for more bike racks for over a year now, to no avail. I guess I’m going to be taking my bike up into my building from now on.

Fail number 2: I still don’t have my Texas drivers license, even though it has been 67 days since I renewed it. It’s even been over three weeks since I first contacted the DPS and was told the license would be remade and resent. Today I found out why it’s taking so long:

You will be mailed out a temporary permit today while you receive your license in the mail. Apparently the license was not remade when the visitor status was updated. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you.

In essence, they cut up my old drivers license, updated their internal database, and never mailed me a new license. Good job, Texas DPS. I’m glad I have an international drivers license as a backup.

DrJava isn’t the barista behind the counter at Starbucks. But the doc still serves a pretty potent brew — and more than a million customers can’t be wrong.

DrJava is a lightweight, integrated development environment for writing programs in Java, the popular, cross-platform programming language developed in the ’90s by Sun Microsystems. Using Java is the simplest way to write programs that run on all major computer platforms, like Windows, Linux and Mac OS. As a result, Java is now the most commonly used programming language, as measured by the Programming Language Popularity index LangPop.com. For several years, universities and high schools have also been using Java in many of their computer science classes.

Our team at Rice University started building DrJava in 2001, and it has now been downloaded more than a million times.

Mathias Ricken is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Rice. (Photo by JEFF FITLOW)

The JavaPLT group at Rice continues to develop DrJava as a SourceForge open-source project, primarily to give students an intuitive interface as they learn programming skills. DrJava users can easily evaluate Java code in an “interactions pane” that shows precisely how their creation is working. The environment also includes powerful features for advanced developers.

The development of DrJava began in 2001, led by Robert Cartwright, a Rice professor of computer science. From its initial release the following spring, DrJava source code emphasized the use of Java generics, a method for reducing duplication in code by factoring out certain repeating patterns. Early in the evolution of DrJava, support for Java generics was added to the interactions pane. After the addition of a project facility in 2004 and improved support for large projects beginning in 2006, DrJava experienced a sharp increase in popularity.

DrJava supports several Java compilers, including Oracle/Sun’s JDK, OpenJDK and the Eclipse Java Compiler, as well as such research compilers as NextGen and Java Mint. In 2005, DrJava introduced support for a hierarchy of Java language levels, a pedagogic framework that helps beginners learn Java by partitioning the language into levels of increasing complexity.

More than 60 Rice students have contributed to DrJava over the years through Dr. Cartwright’s class on production programming or as part of independent study projects. DrJava is now being used at institutions across the globe, including Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Washington, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis and National University Singapore, as well as Rice.

DrJava has also been used as a teaching tool in books published by Pearson Education and Wiley Higher Education.

DrJava is freely distributed under the BSD License. Download it at http://drjava.org/.

—Mathias Ricken is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Rice.

(Reposted from Rice News.)

There was concurrency and parallelism everywhere, just like at SIGCSE earlier this year, but perhaps without as much panic (“We have no idea how to teach this!”).

I wish I had been up for more even more socializing, but for my kind of personality, talking to people is work. I still enjoyed the conference tremendously.

The slides for the talk have become much cleaner over the last few days. We will make them available on the Java Mint website soon.

Eddy Presenting Mint at PLDI 2010