Heather Miller
Executive Director, Scala Center at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Assistant Clinical Professor, Northeastern University
What happened to distributed programming languages?
Nowadays, most programs we write are in some sense distributed—making HTTP requests or serving responses over HTTP, fetching or computing data on some remote resource, building some microservice that is meant to interact with others, etc. With all of this distribution going on, one might ask, what happened to distributed programming languages? Why are we still using languages like Java or C++ for these sorts of tasks? In this talk, Heather will take us on a whirlwind tour through history up to the present of distributed programming languages as well as programming constructs meant for distribution like futures and RPC. Together, we'll try to work out what happened to all of the distributed programming languages!
References
- Programming Models for Distributed Computation by Heather Miller and her students in CS7680 Special Topics in Computing Systems, a course at Northeastern University
- Distributed Programming in Argus by B. Liskov
- Distribution and Abstract Types in Emerald by A.Black, N. Hutchinson, E. Jul, H. Levy, and L.Carter
- The Linda alternative to message-passing systems by N.J. Carriero, D. Gelernter, T.G. Mattson, and A.H. Sherman
- Scala Actors: Unifying thread-based and event-based programming by P. Haller and M. Odersky
- Towards Haskell in the Cloud by J. Epstein, A.P. Black, and S.P. Jones
- Lasp: A Language for Distributed, Coordination-Free Programming by C. Meiklejohn and P.V. Roy
Biography
Heather Miller is the executive director of the Scala Center at EPFL, where she is a research scientist, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. She recently completed her PhD in EPFL's Faculty of Computer and Communication Science where she contributed to the now-widespread programming language, Scala. Heather's research interests are at the intersection of data-centric distributed systems and programming languages, with a focus on transferring her research results into industrial use. She has also led development of popular MOOCs some 800,000 students strong, such as "Functional Programming Principles in Scala."