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Professor Garrett Morris from the University of Iowa will give a talk entitled "On Extensibility."

Abstract: This talk will introduce my research on programming languages, exemplified by some recent results on modularity and extensible data types, as well as briefly describing my career and highlighting the opportunities for graduate study at the University of Iowa.

My research into programming languages and their type systems is guided by two overarching goals.  On the one hand, types should precisely specify program behavior, allowing programmers to rule out classes of erroneous behavior.  On the other, types should enable expressive tools, allowing programmers to build modular, re-usable software and software components.  My work inhabits the intersection of these ideas, refining generic programming mechanisms both to better enforce intended program behavior and to support more expressive abstractions.

Extensibility is an evergreen problem in programming and programming language design.  The goal is simple: specifications of data should support the addition of both new kinds of data and new operations on data.  Despite this problem having been identified as early as 1975, modern languages lack effective solutions.  Object-oriented languages require programmers to adopt unintuitive patterns like visitors, while functional languages rely on encodings of data types.  Lower-level languages, where similar problems arise, rely on textual substitution.  I will present recent work which proposes a unified approach to extensible data specifications.  I will show how this work both encompasses existing approaches to extensible data specifications, and captures examples inexpressible in all existing systems.  Our approach naturally generalizes, providing a single account of extensible objects, effects, and bit-level specifications.

Speaker bio: Garrett Morris is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa.  He received his Ph.D. from Portland State University in Oregon, and post-doctoral training at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.  His research focuses on the development of type systems for higher-order functional programming languages, with the twin aims of improving expressiveness and modularity in high-level programming and supporting safe concurrent, low-level, and effectful programming.  His work has been published in the top venues in theoretical programming languages, and he has received an NSF CAREER award.

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