Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.
IBM Research was recruiting teachers 
1/n
The Big OOPs:
Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025
by Casey Muratori
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI
I don't watch or attend a lot of conferences and talks these days, probably for the same reasons you shouldn't watch as much tv and believe it all as you used to.
But to me, at least, this is a deep and serious one worth your time in a fundamental way. If you are a programmer who actually cares about code and people who are exposed to that code.
Readings shared July 18, 2025. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2025/07/19-readings_shared_07-18-25 #ACL2 #CompSci #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #ITP #LLMs #LeanProver #Rocq #Rust #Teaching
CSLib: An open-source Lean 4 library formalizing a significant subsetof undergraduate-level computer science. ~ Clark Barrett et als. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aJFM3EaI4LcppHR_2YFQHiBjUfMMhMKxCeM3BfINi48 #ITP #LeanProver #CompSci
Has anyone played around with encouraging (but not requiring) students to teach one another?
One way of demonstrating mastery of the material is teaching it to others. I feel like if student A says "Student B really helped me understand the material" that increases my Bayesian posterior that student B understood the material really well (and also that student A understood it, since presumably after student B explained it, student A understood it at least better than they did before).
I wouldn't do this as the only, or even major, part of their grade, but it seems like if the grade is to reflect learning, that teaching it to others certainly reflects on their learning.
(Additional context: this is for a university-level elective technical course in Comp Sci, for 3rd and 4th-years mostly. I generally do flipped classroom and alternative grading - some combo of ungrading, mastery-based, standards-based, but I'm open to ideas. The class has about 55 students, so whatever it is can take some time but not be *too* time-intensive on me & the one TA.)
Teaching children thinking. ~ Seymour A. Papert (1971). https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5835/AIM-247.pdf #CompSci #Teaching
Direct WASM→DOM access doesn't leave JavaScript behind - JS could use the same fast path! We could even build Fagnani's exact templating API as a reference implementation on top of it. But unlike a JS-only solution, the platform stays open for potentially superior approaches in ANY language. Rust might build something faster. Zig might build something smaller. That's the kind of competition through collaboration that drives innovation. Everybody wins wins wins. #compsci #webdev #wasm #javascript
Web's superpower is its openness. Native JS templating makes JS more ergonomic. Direct WASM→DOM makes the web more OPEN. Which better serves the platform's future? The web shouldn't privilege one language. True platform evolution means equal access to core capabilities for all languages. That's how we get the next generation of web innovation. #compsci #webdev #webstandards #opensource
Instead of standardizing one templating syntax (that'll be bikeshedded to death), give us the primitive: fast DOM access from any language. Let a thousand templating libraries bloom - in any language. Lower-level primitives enable more innovation than high-level APIs. That's the Unix philosophy. Simple, composable, powerful. Build the foundation right. #compsci #webdev #wasm #frontend #unix
Frameworks already solved templating. They're good at it! What they CAN'T solve is the JS monopoly on DOM access. Open that up and watch innovation explode across the entire ecosystem. React, Vue, Svelte - they all work great. But imagine what could be built if any language had direct DOM access. New paradigms, new approaches, new frameworks we can't even conceive of yet. #compsci #webdev #javascript
The performance argument for native templating is weak - we're talking 2% gains, max. But remove the JS bridge for WASM? That's where real performance wins live. Fix the actual bottleneck. Every DOM call through JS is overhead we don't need. Direct access would unlock true native speeds for web UIs. Imagine game engines manipulating DOM at 60fps without JS overhead. #compsci #webdev #performance #wasm
Native JS templating: helps JavaScript developers. Direct WASM→DOM: helps EVERY language. Rust, Go, C#, Zig, Swift, Kotlin... all get first-class web UI performance. That's real platform evolution. We shouldn't be adding more JS-specific APIs when we could be opening the web to all languages equally. The web platform should be language-agnostic at its core. #compsci #webdev #webassembly #programming
Why add yet another JS templating API when WASM + direct DOM access solves the root problem? Every language could build efficient UIs without the JS bottleneck. More universal than blessing one syntax. Think beyond JavaScript - imagine Rust components with zero overhead, Go templates that actually perform, or C# Blazor without the bridge tax. That's true platform evolution. #compsci #webdev #wasm #webstandards
Some people still weren't born, or came of age recently and are building the future, but never before had the luxury afforded to them and they have never known a world without React, or a world with non-stupidly complex technology so they keep reinventing things like Mustache.
Happy birthday to Alan Turing, OBE, FRS (1912 – 1954), British #mathematician, #cryptanalyst, computer scientist, prophet & hero. Turing foresaw not only that machines might quite likely develop the capacity to think (after all, our brains are only made of matter, and complex systems of neurons, which either fire or not, much like an electronic switch), but that we needed an objective, double-blind test to determine whether 1/n
Astonishing discovery by computer scientist: how to squeeze space into time https://lobste.rs/s/an5g0c #video #compsci
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuWdXrCmWg
2,000x faster route propagation by rewriting our Traefik gateway in Rust
https://rivet.gg/blog/2025-06-02-faster-route-propagation-by-rewriting-our-traefik-gateway-in-rust
Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://rivet.gg/blog/2025-06-02-faster-route-propagation-by-rewriting-our-traefik-gateway-in-rust
Zero-Cost 'Tagless Final' in Rust with GADT-style Enums
https://www.inferara.com/en/blog/rust-tagless-final-gadt/
Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://www.inferara.com/en/blog/rust-tagless-final-gadt/
I retired from my work architecting computer systems this week and went out to dinner to celebrate. My waitress was a recent Computer Engineer grad struggling to find a job in her field.
I'm skeptical about AI but do think jobs are being lost due to over-promoting it to depress wages and companies drinking the AI kool-aid.
"Learn to Code" Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment
https://futurism.com/computer-science-majors-high-unemployment-rate
