Talking Things Out

Okay, so I'm starting what is essentially my second year of my PhD. Err...there's kinda personal reasons why I was only enrolled for one quarter this past academic year, but suffice it to say that things are resolved enough that I'm starting back up again.

I don't think I've explicitly said where I am and what I'm doing, though. So, to get things out of the way I'm a student at Portland State University. You may not have heard of it. That's okay, I hadn't either but I came here because of the HASP group. Formerly the Programatica team that brought you things like House. Since my interests are in logic, formal methods, type theory, and all that my piece in the research team is to work on defining the semantics of Habit, the language our team has designed and is building a certified compiler for. It's a Haskell-ish language that's strict, has a more interesting typeclass system, and is missing a number of type system extensions that - while interesting in terms of language design in Haskell - aren't really needed for Habit and would just make the semantics and compilation more annoying.

My background really isn't in computer science, it's mostly math and physics, and I didn't start programming until I was in my early 20s. So, I'm not the most typical candidate for a PhD in CS but that's how things go! 

I used to be a bit intimidated by technical blogging, but after the past couple of years the idea of someone randomly showing up in my personal writing space and picking a fight with me just isn't scary anymore.