Welcome to
Brown PLT!

Pyret

Pyret is the main language we're currently working on. We combine the best of functional and scripting languages to create an outstanding language for teaching and, down the road, general-purpose programming. Pyret is an umbrella for several efforts in compilation, type systems, error-reporting, language design, and much more.

Forge

Forge is a new tool and collection of languages for formal modeling. Forge is heavily inspired by Alloy, but offers its own opinionated take on modeling, analysis, and verification.

DCIC

A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing is a new book that lays out our research-driven approach to learning programming, following our data-centric perspective. Suppporting it requires a lot of the other work described on this page.

PLAI

Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation is our programming languages book, in widespread use. All three editions are available online.

People

We have seven faculty members (Kathi Fisler, Milda Zizyte, Nikos Vasilakis, Rob Lewis, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Tim Nelson, Will Crichton), five PhD students (Kuang-Chen Lu, Elijah Rivera, Siddhartha Prasad, Skyler Austen, Gavin Gray), several undergraduates, and a research programmer (Dorai Sitaram).

Joining Us

Thank you for your interest in working with us. We enjoy working with students at every level (from early in college through post-docs).

If you haven't yet been admitted to Brown, see Shriram's contact page.

If you have been admitted to Brown (whether you're already here or not): our work requires background and expertise. Students usually acquire this by taking upper-level (1xxx or higher) courses with us. Therefore, it is most effective to talk to us after you have had such courses (and ideally initiate your discussion with the professor you took the course from). Some of our lower-level courses may announce opportunities too; if you're in one of those courses, keep an ear open for them. We don't work with students who haven't studied with us before; there is simply too much preparation required, and the best way to acquire it is through our courses!

Other Groups

Our take on programming languages strikes a balance between theory, systems, HCI, and more. As a result we often work closely with people in the cognitive engineering, computing education, and systems groups.

Several other faculty in the department have done work that is related to ours, including Maurice Herlihy, Vasileios Kemerlis, Michael Littman, Steve Reiss, Daniel Ritchie, Malte Schwarzkopf.

Finally, we also collaborate with several faculty at other universities (most notably Ben Lerner and Joe Politz) and with (the rest of) Bootstrap.

Blog

We often blog about our work. Our blog is a convenient, lightweight way to learn about some of our research.

Talks

Thanks to our convenient location, we host numerous speakers. We have a shared group calendar; ask Shriram to be added to it.

Papers

All of our papers are online. They have associated repositories of code, data, proofs, and other artifiacts, as appropriate.

Repositories

Most of our recent work is in our github repository, although individual papers have their own repositories elsewhere. In general, a paper's page above is the best source for material about that paper.

Other Systems

We view research and building systems as complementary and mutually-reinforcing. We have worked (and in some cases continue to work) on research-driven systems used by many other people, including JavaScript and Web tools, Flowlog and related tools, Racket and DrRacket, WeScheme, Margrave, Flapjax, FrTime, Continue, Captain Teach, and PerMission.