• TLA⁺ in Practice and Theory
  Part 1: The Principles of TLA⁺

  25 May 2017

  TLA⁺ is a formal specification and verification language intended to help engineers specify, design and reason about complex, real-life algorithms and software or hardware systems. We explore its motivation, application and principles of design.

• The Best Programming Language

  04 Feb 2017

  Programming languages cannot be judged on intrinsic qualities alone.

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Computation

  30 Aug 2016

  Machine and language models of computation differ so greatly in the computational complexity properties of their representation that they form two distinct classes that cannot be directly compared in a meaningful way. While machine models are self-contained, the properties of the language models indicate that they require a computationally powerful collaborator, and are better called models of programming.

• Why Writing Correct Software Is Hard

  23 Jul 2016

  We try to understand the relationship between programs and correctness, and in particular, why writing correct programs must be hard. We will review results from computability theory and complexity theory, and see that programs and complete understanding – which is required for correctness – are fundamentally at odds.