Another meeting that might be of interest to GNHLUG members. The meeting
is open to the public. co-sponsored by the Greater Boston Chapter of the
Association of Computing Machinery (GBC/ACM) and the IEEE.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [GBC-ACM] TALK:Thursday, Sept 20: Guy Steele on Parallel
Programming with Fortress
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:47:54 -0400
From: Peter Mager <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CC: Peter Mager <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Joint meeting of GBC/ACM and Boston/Central New England Chapter of IEEE
Computer Society
Thursday, September 20, 7-9 pm
MIT Media Lab Bartos Auditorium (MIT room E15-070)
What's Cool about Fortress
Guy L. Steele Jr.
Sun Fellow
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
The Fortress programming language is now catching on outside of Sun.
During 2004-2006 it was an internal research project, funded in part by
Sun's contract with DARPA for High Productivity Computer Systems. In
January 2007 it became an open-source project with an open-source
community. People outside Sun are now writing Fortress code and testing
it using the open-source Fortress interpreter. In this talk we will
discuss some of the recent activity in this community as well as
features of Fortress that have made it so appealing. While the language
design was originally aimed at high-end ("petascale") parallel
supercomputers, it appears also to be well-suited for programming
multicore chip and multicore cluster systems.
Guy leads a small computer language research group at Sun Microsystems.
Prior to that, he worked at (among other places) Thinking Machines,
Tartan Labs, and MIT, where the Scheme language he helped develop as his
thesis project was in widespread use for introductory computer science
courses for many years. His involvement in developing computer language
concepts and standardizing computer languages has had a widespread
impact on the entire industry.
In 1975 he codesigned (with Gerald Sussman) the Scheme language, which
was heavily influenced by his graduate work at MIT . Scheme has been
standardized as IEEE Standard 1178-1990 for the Scheme Programming
Language; the 6th revision of this standard is going out for public
balloting this summer.
Guy's two dozen or so papers on Lisp-like languages and their
implementation (sometimes referred to as the "Lambda Papers") have had
widespread influence in the computer language community; in particular,
they persuaded the community that denotational semantics could be used
effectively not only as a descriptive formalism but as a practical means
of implementing a programming language.
Guy was vice chair and then chair of the X3J13 committee that
standardized Common Lisp. He also formalized the grammar of Java, helped
define several language features (including support for generic types),
and coauthored (with James Gosling and Bill Joy) the Java Language
Specification (in print for the last 10 years and now in its third
edition). His book “C: A Reference Manual” (co-authored with Samuel
Harbison) has been in print for 23 years and is now in its fifth
edition. His book "Common Lisp: The Language" has been in print for 22
years and is now in its second edition. He was the project editor for
the first edition of the standard for ECMAScript (popularly known as
"JavaScript"), which is used in every Internet web browser. He also
served on the X3J11 standards committee (C programming language).
One important thrust of Guy’s work has been the extension of programming
languages to support parallelism and high performance computing. In this
context, he designed Connection Machine Lisp (for fine-grained parallel
symbolic computing) and C* (an extended C language for data parallel
programming), and contributed heavily to the design of Fortran 90 and
High Performance Fortran, for which his book “The High Performance
Fortran Handbook” (with four co-authors) is one of the main reference
sources. His current work in the design of the Fortress language extends
this work.
The MIT Media Lab is at 20 Ames St, on the side of the MIT Campus
closest to the Kendall Sq T stop. The Bartos Auditorium (room E15-070)
is one flight down, in the basement.
We are planning on serving light refreshments in the lobby (atrium area)
outside the Bartos Auditorium just before the talk. We need a volunteer
who is willing to pick up some drinks (bottled water, soft drinks,
juice, cups and ice) at a local super market and bring them to the talk.
(They'll, of course, be reimbursed by the GBC/ACM for the costs
involved). Please contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org) if you
are willing to help with this or for additional information.
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