So it seems like NEPLS has finally gone back to happening twice a year. As you may know, I attended the one hosted at UML in May this year, and that was my first time at any sort of programming language meetup. This time it was hosted at Boston University.

Boston public transport

Completely unrelated to programming languages, but this was my first time dealing with public transport in any real capacity. I took the commuter rail train from Lowell to North Station, and then took the green line to BU. It’s certainly a lot less stressful than driving. If I had driven in, I also have no idea where I would have parked. A week before the conference I did a “test run” to make sure I knew what I was doing and where I was going. Special thanks to one of my sister’s friends who lives in Boston for helping me figure this stuff out.

The conference

Duan Family Center for Computing and Data Science at night

The conference was hosted on the 11th floor of this extremely freaky looking building. Suffice to say, I did not take the stairs to get up there.

I arrived at around 9:30, when they were serving breakfast, and started talking with a professor from Northeastern and one of her grad students. I told them about the work I was doing on adding a security type system to LLVM. At some point I started asking for advice about industry jobs in PL: what do employers want, is just a bachelor’s degree enough, etc. I’ll repeat their answer to the 2nd question here. It seems like there’s basically 2 types of PL jobs: engineers and researchers. Engineers do all the applied PL stuff, like working on implementing compilers and optimizations and all that. If you want that kind of job, a bachelor’s is perfectly fine, but you should have some good personal projects as well. Researchers do all the theory stuff: formal proofs, specifying language semantics, etc. For that kind of job, a master’s, which I was really considering going for at some point not too long ago, is necessary but not sufficient. You really need a PhD and good publications for that. As for the 1st question, she referred me to someone else to have it answered.

The talks began at 10. At NEPLS in May, I noticed formal verification seemed to be the big thing in PL right now. That’s certainly still the case, if these talks were anything to go by. It’s not enough for a programmer to just say that their program fulfills certain properties, they should be able to prove it too. GPU programming was a pretty notable topic too, there were at least 3 talks dedicated to it. AI and LLMs, the object of the entire industry’s hype right now, featured to some notable degree too. 1 talk asked, can we make LLMs formally verify their own generated code?

Right as lunch was about to start, one of the organizers stood up and said, “Now it’s time for lunch, but due to budget cuts, there is no lunch. Get your own.” This wasn’t exactly something I had accounted for, and I haven’t spent enough time in Boston to know where any good restaurants are. So I just followed this group of like 10 random people from the conference and got tacos from some place down the street.

Talking to them after I had finished eating, I learned they were a group of grad students from Brown University. Some of them were presenters. 1 of them had actually gone to UML as an undergrad, so it was nice being able to talk to them about that. In theory there might have been some other UML students aside from me at the conference, but I definitely didn’t see anyone I knew. Sadly, none of my friends are programming language freaks like me.

There was another hour of talks followed by another break. During the break, I see the guy that the professor directed me to standing alone at the front of the room. Here’s my chance, I guess. I start talking to him and asking him the same questions about industry jobs. At some point in the conversation, he pulls over 2 other guys who apparently work at the same company as him. 1 of them starts talking about how understaffed they are, and how they have some open positions at their company related to stuff I’m interested in… then he straight up says “You should come work with us.”

Dear god, did I just network?

Honestly, I think it would be quite cynical to say that the primary value of going to something like this is to network with the aim of getting a job. My reason for going to NEPLS was quite literally just because I wanted to hear the talks, learn what was going on in programming languages right now, and maybe network a bit to learn about the industry and jobs. Multiple people asked me why I was there if I wasn’t a presenter. I was basically just there for fun. But now that I know things like this can happen… it makes it all the more important that I use opportunities like these to network. This could be my chance to get my foot in the door and really start my career. You never know when or where you’ll get a chance to do something like this.

Coming attractions

I think the end of this semester is going to be a very exciting time. I’m working on 2 pretty significant school projects right now: one is a paper on the Curry-Howard correspondence (quite a monster of a paper if I may add, it’s like 50 pages and it only covers 2 corners of the lambda cube!), the other is a machine learning project that tests whether sentence embedding models are capable of correctly classifying languages. No, we’re not classifying sentences, we’re classifying entire languages. In terms of personal projects, I’m very slowly learning how to use LLVM to make a language. Once those things are finished I’ll post about them here and on LinkedIn.