Anthony Di Franco: Tentative Design of a Fifth System

The last time he talked to us (on October 26th -- https://www.meetup.com/SF-Types-Theorems-and-Programming-Languages/events/226067416/), Anthony told us about a system he's working on, called Fifth. He's pinned down some more of the details now, and will talk to us about them. Here's how he explains it:

“Last year, I spoke in rambling, discursive, high-level terms about philosophical and pragmatic motivations for revisiting certain aspects of the fifth-generation computing agenda, and about more modern concepts with which to round it out and more modern technical tools with which to implement the resulting whole. Practical benefits of such a system might include a combinatorial reduction in complexity of software, by automating the passage from specification to algorithm, and the ability to deal directly with uncertain information, and use it to efficiently learn recursive structure from data and generate instances from specified and learned structure.

“This time, I'd like to focus on the technical approach to implementing the system, and present a more concrete and linear account of how it might be built and how it might work.”

As always, we'll station Adrian at the front door to Mixrank between about 6:15 and 6:45 to let people in. Phone or text 650-387-2209 if you'll arrive earlier or later.