Paper! Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages

Recap

Jan 27, Ben helped us navigate some intriguing ideas in the realm of language semantics in Strachey's excellent paper, "Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages". As this topic was I think outside many of our comfort zones there were a lot of diversions where Ben helped explain some of the basics of this field. For instance, a new idea for me was the idea that one should try to identify precisely the true meaning of a given program in a mathematical sense. This is a fascinating concept to me, that I will likely keep thinking about for some time to come, as in my mental model, I think I've tended to think of a program as instructions to be performed, and the semantics of what the code does would live at a higher level of abstraction, maybe involving some documentation or some helpful comments in the source code.