Everything in Context

Yesterday, there was a discussion on a  mailing list I'm on  about a perception of gender diversity problems in the communities around functional programming, type theory, and programming language theory, even relative to other areas of computer science. After some speculation about education barriers and community approachability, I decided to conduct an informal survey on Twitter: if you think typed/functional programming is harder/more intimidating than other kinds, can you say why in a tweet? won't argue just curious — chrisamaphone (@chrisamaphone) December 17, 2013 You can read several of the (filtering for sarcasm/criticisms of languages) collected responses on Storify . I left "typed", "functional", and the combination thereof intentionally ambiguous because I was interested in how people interpreted those words as well as their reactions to whatever programming constructs they associated with them. Because I promised not to argue with anyone

I passed my thesis proposal ! As I've spoken to more and more people about my work, I'm learning about a bunch of exciting related systems, and now I have a big pile of reading to do! Here's what's currently on my stack: The Oz Project:  Bob Harper and Roger Dannenberg brought to my attention a defunct CMU interactive fiction project called  Oz , which efforts had some brief extra-academic fame through the Façade game. I've printed out the following papers  which seem most relevant to my work: Hap: A Reactive, Adaptive Architecture for Agents A. Bryan Loyall and Joseph Bates. Technical Report CMU-CS-91-147, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, June 1991. An Architecture for Action, Emotion, and Social Behavior Joseph Bates, A. Bryan Loyall, and W. Scott Reilly. Techical Report CMU-CS-92-144, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. May 1992. Also appearing in  Artificial Social Systems: Fourt