Instead of being a judgement of what PL research should be, this short post is simply a reflection of my research interests and what role PL plays into it.
During a recent PLDG talk, the speaker said, “I think that, as a community, PL people have a moral responsibility to step in and say, ‘No, you’re having fun wrong!’.” I have no qualms about the comment itself—jokes can be a useful tool in presentations; however, it did led me to think about the way PL research is applied in new domains.
In a classic programming languages presentation, the speaker starts with an overview of a domain, talks about the current state of the art of programming languages and tools in it, and then go on to point out that most tools and languages fail to make use of amazing and well-known PL techniques. Then they describe their work which applies the aforementioned PL technique and build cool and interesting language abstractions with the promise of building better and improved tools for the domain. It is rarely the case that the tool or language proposed actually solves the problems in the motivation. Yes, do tell me how your tiny language will stop Google from going down twice a year.
While I strongly endorse PL techniques and research being applied in new domains, this story demonstrates a fundamental issue for me: Application of PL techniques is done retrospectively. PL researchers are not there when a domain is shaping up and people trying to build tools and programming languages for that domain. Only once people have made build these tools, which in turn cement themselves into domain, do PL researchers come into the scene and apply their cool techniques—at a point where practitioners are unlikely to adopt something new.
So here is my solution: We should stop being PL researchers—we should take it upon themselves to learn about new domains and apply ourselves well before the standards are established. Programming languages are the fundamental way of communicating intent to computers. As PL researchers, we should be actively helping people from other domains, not waiting for them to realize the error of their ways and come to us.