PhD Thesis Progress

Babelsberg

I am writing my dissertation on Babelsberg, a family of language experiments and that implement a design for adding constraint solving and automatically maintained assertions to ordinary object-oriented languages. You know how you sometimes write assert some.code.that.calls(stuff). And if your assertion fails, you crash? In Babelsberg, you can write always some.code.that.calls(stuff), and rather than crashing directly, the system will attempt to “heal” the program state to make the assertion pass (if it doesn’t already). This works great more often than you would think, and sometimes it even completely frees you from writing the code to establish a correct state in the first place! Just let the system deal with it - a Sudoku solver? No problem, I know what a valid solution should look like, I can just always that. Load balancing for video streaming, automatic repair of partially downloaded image data, layouting. We’ve found a number of interesting applications.