A palestra “Declarative Programming” será proferida por Steven Pemberton, investigador de renome na área da Ciência da Computação e das Tecnologias de Informação e ACM Distinguished Speaker, no dia 23 de outubro, às 10h00, na sala B033, e será moderada pelo Prof. João Ferreira. A entrada é livre.
Resumo:
“In the 50s, when the first programming languages were designed, computers cost millions, and relatively, programmers were almost free. Those programming languages therefore reflected that relationship: it didn’t matter if it took a long time to program, as long as the resulting program ran as fast as possible.
Now, that relationship has been reversed, which I call Moore’s Switch: compare to the cost of programmers, computers are almost free.
And yet we are still programming in descendants of the programming languages from the 50s: we are still telling the computers step by step how to solve the program.
Declarative programming is a new approach to applications: rather than describing exactly how to reach the solution, it describe what the solution should look like, and leaves more of the administrative parts of the program to the computer.
One of the few declarative languages available is XForms, an XML-based language that despite what its name might suggest is not only about form. Large projects, at large companies such as the National Health Service, the BBC and Xerox, have shown that by using XFoms, programming time and cost of application can be reduced to a tenth and sometimes even much more.”
Sobre o Palestrante:
“Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the field of computer science and information technology, with a long and rich history of contributions to the development of the internet and the web. He is affiliated with the Dutch national research centre Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he conducts research on interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies.
At university he was tutored by Dick Grimsdale who built the world’s first transistorised computer, and who was himself a tutee of Alan Turing. After university, Pemberton — coincidentally — worked in Turing’s old department in Manchester, writing software for the 5th computer in the line of computers Turing had worked on.
Pemberton was the first user of the open internet in Europe when the CWI created the first connection in 1988, and has been involved with the web from its inception, co-designing several web standards, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa. He chairs two groups at W3C.
In addition to his work on the web, Pemberton has also made significant contributions to other areas of computer science, such as the design of programming languages, having co-designed the language that Python is based on, and the study of human-computer interaction. His involvement with ACM includes being editor in chief of The SIGCHI Bulletin, and then ACM interactions for a decade; he has chaired the CHI Conference and he co-founded the Netherlands local SIGCHI group, and chaired several local CHI conferences there.
He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award and the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award.
As a speaker, Pemberton is known for his engaging and informative presentations, which draw on his deep knowledge of computer science and his passion for technology, and cover both social and technological aspects of computing. His talks are always thought-provoking and entertaining, and he has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events around the world. In 2023 he became an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He is bi-lingual in English and Dutch.
A fuller bio, videos, and a full list of talks is available on his website: https://www.cwi.nl/~steven”