Communications of the ACM
Penn Profs Work to Build Bug-Free Computer Programs
Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania are working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale and Princeton universities, on a project to enable developers to build bug-free programs.
Credit: Roblox.com
University of Pennsylvania professors Benjamin Pierce, Stephanie Weirich, and Steve Zdancewic are working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale and Princeton universities on the Science of Deep Specification (DeepSpec) project, which will enable developers to build bug-free programs.
The project will create precise descriptions of the behavior of software based on formal logic, which also will enable developers to verify their programs behave exactly as intended.
Weirich says deep specifications previously have not been a priority for the software industry, despite their obvious benefits. "It's hard to create specifications, and for the most part, the software industry has found it not cost-effective at all," Weirich says. "They've kind of abandoned it as an academic enterprise, something that professors do but that is never going to have an impact at all. But we think this is wrong."
The DeepSpec project's board of technology industry advisors includes representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, and one of its goals is to change standards in academics, as well as in the tech industry. "A big part of the pitch of our 'expedition' was a proposal to revamp certain aspects of the undergraduate computer science curriculum," Pierce says.
From The Daily Pennsylvanian
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