Saturday, 8:30AM CDT
Doors OpenBreakfast won’t be served, so please eat before coming to the event.
Saturday, 9:00AM CDT
KeynoteFrom Here To Lambda And Back Again
Renowned computer scientist Douglas Crockford delivers a thought-provoking keynote address at RacketCon 2023, tracing the evolution of programming language paradigms and presenting a compelling argument for the resurgence of the actor model, a paradigm that emerged in the 1970s.
Crockford, a renowned expert in programming language design and implementation, guides the audience on a captivating journey through the history of programming paradigms, highlighting their strengths, limitations, and impact on the field. He astutely observes the recurring cycles of paradigm popularity, with each new paradigm promising to revolutionize software development only to eventually be overtaken by the next, and often for reasons more to do with inertia than merit.
In a bold and insightful prediction, Crockford asserts that the actor model, once considered a niche paradigm, is poised to reclaim its prominence in the future of programming. He eloquently explains how the actor model’s inherent concurrency and message-passing capabilities align perfectly with the demands of modern distributed and cloud-based computing environments.
Crockford’s insights serve as a timely reminder of the importance of revisiting and reappraising past paradigms to uncover hidden potential and adapt to the ever-changing landscape of software development.
Saturday, 10:00AM CDT
CoffeeSaturday, 10:30AM CDT
Sage GerardIntroducing Rackith
Rackith is a language-oriented programming language based on Racket. Use Rackith to define many languages with one syntax object. Discussion covers project design and implications for the personal computer.
Bio: Sage is a programmer by hobby and trade. If you bought a car, educated kids, or avoided a lawsuit, then you may have used his code.
Saturday, 11:00AM CDT
Chenhao Zhang#lang Karp: Formulating and Random Testing NP Reductions
Reduction, a pervasive idea in computer science, is often
taught in algorithm courses with NP problems. The
traditional pen-and-paper approach is notoriously
ineffective both for students and instructors: Subtle
mistakes in reductions are often hard to detect by merely
inspecting the purported solutions. Constructing a
counterexample by hand to expose the mistake is even more
onerous. Based on the observation that reductions are
actually programs, we designed
#lang Karp, a DSL for
formulating and random testing NP reductions. In this talk,
I’m going to discuss the implementation of Karp on top of
Racket and solver-aided host language
Rosette.
Saturday, 11:30AM CDT
Lukas LazarekMutate: Inject Bugs into Your Programs!
In this talk I’ll introduce
mutate, a library for mutating programs, i.e. injecting possible bugs by making small syntactic changes to the program syntax. I’ll talk about what mutation is, why one might want it, and demo how to use the library.
Bio: Lukas is a PL PhD student at Northwestern. He’s graduating this winter and is on the job market.
Saturday, 12:00PM CDT
Adam PerlinIncrementally Developing Support for Racket->Wasm Compilation
Wasm is an attractive compiler target for a variety of reasons: it has support in all major browsers, its isolation guarantees are beneficial for security reasons, and it has potential as a general-purpose platform-independent execution environment. However, adding Wasm support to Racket has proven a challenging problem due to differences in the execution model each language uses at runtime. Chez Scheme, the backend of Racket CS, utilizes code generation conventions which are difficult to adapt to Wasm. This talk will present an alternative approach to Racket-to-Wasm compilation which is compatible with Racket CS. The approach is accomplished by using an existing bytecode format and interpreter which are already supported under Chez Scheme, and performing an ahead-of-time translation of portions of bytecode programs into Wasm. This sets up an incremental approach to the development of a Racket-to-Wasm compilation system.
Bio: Adam Perlin is a software engineer in Microsoft Azure. He completed BS and MS degrees in Computer Science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a Master’s thesis focused on Racket to Wasm translation.
Saturday, 12:30PM CDT
LunchLunch will served buffet-style right next to the lecture hall.
Saturday, 2:00PM CDT
Jeremy SiekTeaching and Learning Compilers Incrementally
This talk is an introduction to the joys of teaching and
learning about compilers using the incremental approach. The talk
provides a sneak-preview of a compiler course based on the new
textbooks from MIT Press,
Essentials of Compilation: An Incremental
Approach in Racket/Python.
The course takes students on a journey
through constructing their own compiler for a small but powerful
language. The standard approach to describing and teaching compilers
is to proceed one pass at a time, from the front to the back of the
compiler. Unfortunately, that approach obfuscates how language
features motivate design choices in a compiler. In this course we
instead take an incremental approach in which we build a complete
compiler every two weeks, starting with a small input language that
includes only arithmetic and variables. We add new language features
in subsequent iterations, extending the compiler as necessary.
Students get immediate positive feedback as they see their compiler
passing test cases and then learn important lessons regarding software
engineering as they grow and refactor their compiler throughout the
semester.
Bio: Jeremy Siek is a Professor at Indiana University. Jeremy’s interests include programming language design, type systems, mechanized theorem proving, and compilers.
Saturday, 2:30PM CDT
Anurag Mendhekar and Daniel P. FriedmanMalt: A Deep Learning Framework for Racket
We discuss the design of a deep learning toolkit,
Malt, that has been built for Racket. Originally designed to support the pedagogy of
The Little Learner—A Straight Line to Deep Learning, it is used to build deep neural networks with a minimum of fuss using tools like higher-order automatic differentiation and rank polymorphism. The natural, functional style of AI programming that Malt enables can be extended to much larger, practical applications. We present a roadmap for how we hope to achieve this so that it can become a stepping stone to allow Lisp/Scheme/Racket to reclaim the crown of being
the language for Artificial Intelligence (perhaps!).
Saturday, 3:00PM CDT
David StorrsData Integrity via Smart Structs
Structs in Racket should be more than dumb data storage. They should be data models in the sense of MVC programming; they should ensure that their contents are valid according to your project’s business rules and they should make it easy to do common operations such as storing to a database or generating a struct from data of another type such as a database row or user input field.
The
struct-plus-plus module makes this easy. It allows you to place contracts on individual fields, specify business rules that ensure integrity between fields, easily create converter functions, and much more, with all of these things being part of the struct definition and therefore in one easily-referenced location. Come see how it all works and how you can simplify your code with struct-plus-plus!
Bio: David Storrs has been a professional programmer since the mid 90s, working in a wide array of fields. He has started and operated multiple companies in the last 15 years and published about four million words of SF&F in the last 10. He is currently co-founder at AllPossible Solutions, a software consulting company focused in bioinformatics. He discovered Racket back when it was called PLT and has been in love ever since.
Saturday, 3:30PM CDT
CoffeeSaturday, 4:00PM CDT
Sam Phillipskeyring: Uniformly Access Secrets
Hardcoding passwords in your programs is bad. Using secure password stores are
good.
Keyring is a Racket library that allows programs to access different
password stores using a simple interface.
Saturday, 4:30PM CDT
Sid Kasivajhula,
feat. Michael BallantyneRedeeming Open Source with Attribution Based Economics
Attribution Based Economics (ABE) is a new paradigm for economics that revises several foundational assumptions governing today’s systems, including the nature of economic value and the origin of money. In this new paradigm, open source software becomes economically viable and, indeed, even financially favored over proprietary models. This talk describes our experiences implementing an early prototype for
the Qi project, and also how Racket will be an essential part of the solution as ABE scales past the pilot stage.
Bio: Growing up in various parts of India, Sid had the opportunity to see and live amidst large scale poverty (from which he was fortunately spared direct experience) during his childhood. Decades later, he arrived in Silicon Valley, like so many other wide-eyed travelers from around the world, hoping to make a difference. But the solutions and attitude he saw in startups didn’t add up in his mind to true and lasting solutions that could solve all of the problems he’d witnessed from the brink, nor did they even add up to the effective innovation that startups are supposed to be good at. In the years since, Sid spent a lot of time understanding the essence of economic systems, and developed Attribution Based Economics as an alternative to capitalism and other established economic systems, one that promises to retain all of their best qualities and none of their drawbacks. Together, Sid and many generous and talented individuals in the Racket and other open source communities have begun to put into operation an early prototype of ABE. The Qi programming language is part of the ABE pilot, and the numerous contributors to this language are already getting paid from money that’s been raised! He hopes you will join him in carrying the work on ABE forward, so that with your help, our economic processes can be based on the wholesome and organic human connections that are the soil of great possibility.
Saturday, 5:00PM CDT
Micah CantorCrafting Interpreters in Typed Racket
My first Typed Racket program was an interpreter for the Lox language from Bob Nystrom’s book
Crafting Interpreters. In this talk, I’ll discuss the design decisions I made when translating from Nystrom’s Java, as well as the fun and frustrating aspects of Typed Racket I discovered in the process. I’ll also give a retrospective on learning how to adapt a traditional compiler to Racket’s language-oriented paradigm.
Bio: Micah is a student at Grinnell College with interests in compilers, functional programming, writing and education.
Sunday, 9:00AM CDT
Doors OpenBreakfast won’t be served, so please eat before coming to the event.
Sunday, 9:30AM CDT
Robby FindlerEsterel in Racket
Concurrency and thread preemption are tools that can make programs more modular. Unfortunately, in conventional programming models, combining state and concurrency (to say nothing of preemption!) makes programs extremely hard to get right.
Esterel offers a different programming model that is designed such that concurrency, state change, and thread preemption can all be used harmoniously. It dates to the 1980s and is the brainchild of Gérard Berry.
Unfortunately, the standard implementation technique for Esterel (as embodied in Manuel Serrano’s JS+Esterel integration, HipHop) requires a form of staging that leaks out and affects the programming model. I’ve been working on a different implementation technique that uses continuations as to try to get a more seamless integration with a conventional programming language (Racket, naturally).
In the talk, I’ll try to use examples to make some sense out of what’s written in the second paragraph and, more generally, give a demo of this
new implementation. If we have time, I’ll also try to explain how the implementation actually works.
Sunday, 10:00AM CDT
Matthew FlattRhombus: Status Update
This talk demonstrates the current version of Rhombus, which is a new programming language that seamlessly integrates Racket’s powerful macro system with a conventional infix syntax. Rhombus’s goal is to make Racket’s macro capabilities more accessible: through the use of conventional syntax, by unifying more programming and metaprogramming constructs (e.g., using `match` for data and for code), and by packaging common patterns for macro primitives into out-of-the-box coordination facilities (e.g., macro-extensible binding positions). Through live coding on example programs, the talk demonstrates how Rhombus features work together to define a convenient and expressive programming language.
Sunday, 10:30AM CDT
CoffeeSunday, 11:00AM CDT
Sam Tobin-HochstadtThe State of Racket
Join Sam Tobin-Hochstadt for an informative and insightful overview of the latest developments in the Racket language and community. This annual address covers key advancements, milestones, and community contributions achieved over the past year, providing a comprehensive update on the language’s growth, direction, and impact.
Learn about the latest improvements to Typed Racket, including shallow and optional types, as well as the integration of Racket’s Chez Scheme fork upstream, a significant culmination of years of collaboration. Explore the contributions of the community, including big improvements in Racket Mode for Emacs and the r16 trick bot for Discord, and much more.
Sam also provides a glimpse into the future of Racket, teasing upcoming releases and innovations that are on the horizon, providing insights into the community’s roadmap which includes type inference, compiling Racket to web, and enhanced tooling further streamlining the process of finding and installing Racket packages.
Whether you’re a seasoned Racket developer or a newcomer to the language, don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the latest developments in Racket and get a sneak peek at its future!
Sunday, 11:30AM CDT
Racket ManagementRacket Town Hall
Please come with your big questions and discussion topics.
We have reserved a block of rooms at the
Hilton Orrington.
The block includes Deluxe King rooms at the rate of $189
per night and Deluxe Queen rooms with two beds at the rate
of $209 per night. To make a reservation, use the previous
direct booking link, which already includes the RacketCon
discount.
If that link doesn’t work, you may also reserve by phone by
calling
+1 (800) 445-8667.
When calling, be sure to tell them you are reserving a room
to attend
RacketCon. Reservations must be made by September 27th to
get the block rate.
