Welcome to the PL Club Blog!

Dear Reader,

The University of Pennsylvania’s PL Club is excited to announce the launch of our brand new blog! My name is Harrison Goldstein, and I will be the editor of the blog through the Summer of 2020. We plan on rotating editorship every few months so that we can experiment with different ideas and approaches, and I am honored to start things off! In this post, I’ll give a brief overview our goals for this exciting project.

First and foremost, we want this blog to be a place for PL Club members to share bits and pieces of work that they find interesting or useful. Conferences are great for publishing big, cohesive research contributions, but a lot of what we do as PhD students and post-docs is useful in smaller chunks. This blog will be a place for tutorials, tangential work, ideas-in-progress, opinions, and anything else that we think others might find exciting.

We also hope that this blog will become a place for prospective students, faculty, and researchers to learn about the sorts of things we do in the PL Club. We will be encouraging our weekly PL Club presenters to write blog posts to accompany their talks, so many of the topics and ideas in this blog will closely mirror the things that we discuss in Penn PL.

Finally, as the blog grows and changes, we hope to be able to use it as an archive of the ideas we’ve considered, the tools we’ve used, and the cool stuff we’ve done. Speaking personally, I hope to be able to scroll back through the blog in 10 or 15 years and be reminded of the amazing work that my colleagues and I were doing.

As of today, there are two amazing posts already up on the blog.

• R E S P E C T - Find Out What It Means To The Coq Standard Library, by Lucas Silver
  This post, based on a tutorial that Lucas did for our Coq reading group, explores the ins and outs of rewriting in Coq.

• Defunctionalize the Continuation, by Li-yao Xia
  Defunctionalization is a programming technique that emulates higher-order functions using only first-order language features. Li-yao gives an overview of the technique and explores some of its uses.

Give these posts a read! A huge thanks to Lucas and Li-yao for starting us off. Moving forward, we will be releasing a new post every other Monday. We have an RSS feed available, and we will also send each post to the PL Club mailing list.

Keep in mind that this blog is supposed to be a safe space for our students to share ideas and opinions. While these posts do not necessarily reflect the thoughts or views of the University, they do reflect the thoughts and views of real people. When interacting with these blog posts on social media (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) please be kind.

We are excited to share our work with you! Watch this space for more.

Best,
Harrison Goldstein
Blog Editor