Who

I am Paolo G. Giarrusso, a PhD student in the Programming Languages and Software Engineering group under the supervision of Prof. Klaus Ostermann. I started my PhD in Marburg University, but we recently moved to Tübingen University.

Research interests

My interests are in programming language theory and practice, especially in Haskell and Scala. I often work on embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs).

In particular, I focus on the design and optimization of embedded query languages.

As a side project, I am trying with my colleagues to analyze precisely the pragmatics benefits of elegance in language design, by extracting from programming language and semantics theory concrete design principles.

I am trying to attack the problem of incremental computation: when the input to your computation changes a bit, how do you update the output efficiently? I am also trying to arrive at an elegant solution, also following the above design principles.

I follow the development of the Scala programming language rather closely. I’ve contributed small patches, analyzed language features, and am learning more about the language.

Since the defining and most challenging feature of Scala is its unification of ML modules and objects, I’m currently learning more about different variations on ML-style module systems.