Oct
25
Thomas visited rainy Portland to co-chair the Fifth Workshop on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools at SPLASH 2014. There were many great talks on topics ranging from making programming more social through newsfeeds to an analysis of how race detection tools benefit developers. Josh Bloch, designer of the Java collections framework and author of Effective Java, gave an awesome keynote on the history of the API, including one of the most prescient two page papers ever written. New this year was a track for hypotheses papers, explicitly detailing the expecting practical usability implications of language features and tools on the practice of programming. For example, Jonathan Aldrich gave a retrospective of his work on programming language design for protocols, detailing hypotheses about its practical benefits for developers. The day concluded with some animated group brainstorming on the usability effects of types, program analysis, API documentation, and IDEs.
