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Challenges with Locality and State in ExPL Annotations, Part I

ExPL, the experiment specification language of Helical, relies on user-provided annotations to infer an implicit post-interventional causal structure and query set. Annotations are attached to ExPL expressions and provide a link to the program variables in HyPL. Because ExPL encodes stateful executions, we need to be able to reason about the scope over which stateful operations apply. In this two-part blog post we'll talk about some challenges associated with using these annotations.

POPL 2015 Artifact Evaluation Revisted

Just over a decade again POPL ran its first artifact evaluation and I was on it! I'm listed in the proceedings as "Emma F. Tosch" as an inside joke with Arjun, who ran the committee. I have what only I think is a Very Interesting Tale of reviewing, but that's not what this post is about. Instead, this post is about tracking down those old artifacts with just a pinch of oral history.

What even is a "parameter"?

"Parameter" is one of those commonly used words in mathematics and computing and in my experience is rarely explicitly defined. While most uses have similar meanings, there can be small differences in their interpretation. Parameters and other statistical entities are important to the semantics and correctness of the Helical system, so it's worth considering what we mean by these terms.

  • in DSLs
  • 4 min read

DSL Usability Research

In my previous post, I asserted:

...learning a new formal language can itself contribute to the difficulty of encoding an experiment.

This statement was based on assumptions, intuitions, and folk wisdom. I started digging into the DSL usability research to see if I could find explicit support for this statement. This blog post is about what I found.