Designing software for ease of extension and contraction

October 31, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Designing software for ease of extension and contraction Parnas, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1979 A couple of weeks ago we looked at ‘A design methodology for reliable software systems’. David Parnas posted a comment (thank you!) giving some more insight into the history of Dijkstra’s “levels of abstraction” concept: This paper followed Dijkstra in ... Continue Reading

A Bayesian approach to graphical record linkage and de-duplication

October 28, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

A Bayesian approach to graphical record linkage and de-duplication Steorts et al. AISTATS, 2014 I don't normally cover papers from statistics conferences and journals, but this one caught my eye as addressing a high-value problem. Through a different lens, it also shows some of the challenges in maintaining privacy when it is possible to join ... Continue Reading

Replex: A scalable, highly available multi-index data store

October 27, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Replex: A scalable, highly available multi-index data store Tai et al. USENIX 2016 Today’s choice won a best paper award at USENIX this year. Replex addresses the problem of key-value stores in which you also want to have an efficient query capability by values other than the primary key. … NoSQL databases achieve scalability by ... Continue Reading

Preemptive intrusion detection: theoretical framework and real-world measurements

October 26, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Preemptive intrusion detection: theoretical framework and real-world measurements Cao et al, HotSoS 2015 Phuong Cao (the first author of this paper) got in touch following my review of DeepDive to say "Thanks for the review on DeepDive. I was inspired by that paper to apply factor graph on detecting intrusions at an early stage..." Preemptive ... Continue Reading

Purposes, concepts, misfits, and a redesign of Git

October 25, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Purposes, concepts, misfits, and a redesign of GitDe Rosso & Jackson OOPSLA '16 It's OOPSLA in just a few weeks time, and 'Purposes, concepts, misfits, and a redesign of Git' will be presented there, bringing the story we looked at yesterday up to date. The subject matter is the same of course - looking at ... Continue Reading

What’s wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis

October 24, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments

What's wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis De Rossi & Jackson Onward! 2013 We finished up last week talking about the how to find good concepts / abstractions in a software design and what good modularization looks like. Today's paper jumps 40+ years to look at some of those issues in a modern context ... Continue Reading

A design methodology for reliable software systems

October 21, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

A design methodology for reliable software systems Liskov 1972 We've come to the end of Liskov's list. The final paper is by Barbara Liskov herself, on the question of how best to go about designing software systems so that we can have some confidence they will work. The unfortunate fact is that the standard approach ... Continue Reading

Programming with Abstract Data Types

October 20, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Programming with Abstract Data Types Liskov & Zilles, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 1974 This is paper 6/7 from Liskov's list, and it's by Barbara Liskov herself. What an enormous impact this paper has had on how we program today. Has there been any single advance in programming languages since this work (42 years ago) which has ... Continue Reading

Protection in programming languages

October 19, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Protection in programming languages Morris Jr., CACM 1973 This is paper 5/7 on Liskov's list. Experienced programmers will attest that hostility is not a necessary precondition for catastrophic interference between programs. So what can we do to ensure that program modules are appropriately protected and isolated? We still need to allow modules to cooperate and ... Continue Reading

Hierarchical program structures

October 18, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Hierarchical Program Structures Dahl and Hoare, 1972 We continue to work our way through Liskov's list. 'Hierarchical program structures' is actually a book chapter, and is notable for defining a 'prefix' mechanism that looks awfully like a form of class inheritance, paving the way for hierarchical program structures (i.e. Class hierarchies). The main takeaway for ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Made delightfully fast by strattic

Month: October 2016