[Python-Dev] Ph.D. dissertation ideas?

[Brett Cannon]

On 1/12/06, Dennis Allison <allison at shasta.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Brett,
>
> Where are you doing your Phd and who will be your likely supervisor?
> It does make a difference.
>

University of British Columbia under Eric Wohlstadter in the Software
Practices Lab.

> Your dissertation idea list seems to me to focus on implementation
> projects and not on research.  Usually a dissertation proceeds from a
> hypothesis leading to an experiment, some measurements, and conclusions.
> Many universities tacitly expect a theorem and associated proof. The goal
> of dissertation research is a completed approved dissertation, not some
> intergalactic all encompassing contribution to human knowledge.
> Dissertation research should, IMHO, focus on a small, manageable problem.
>

The topics are a little on the implementation side partially from my
personal taste in projects; I have always had a major bent towards the
practical over theoretical (reason I love Python so much  =).  Plus
the lab I am in tends towards the practical and not into the
theoretical (e.g., the number of Eclipse plug-ins being developed as
part of theses and dissertations here).

But I am open for theoretical work (as long as it does not involve
type inference).

> Frequently, universities have a large cooperative project involving many
> graduate students, each of whom research a small, well defined topic areas
> related to the larger project.   Is this the case for your dissertation?
>

Nope.  Nothing going on at the moment here in terms of a large scoped
project with multiple parts to it.

> What are your interests?  Are you interested in language structure,
> language implementation, the formal interface between languages and
> applications, or what.
>

Tough question.  Language design is the over-reaching area that I
love.  Basically how can powerful language ideas be presented in a
easy-to-use fashion.  Could even generalize even farther to just
making programming easier through the language.  And for some reason
networking protocols and concurrent programming have always caught my
eye (have not delved deep into these topics but I always catch myself
doing stuff such as reading the ICMP standard or reading all of the
various arguments for or against threading).

> Like most folks who lurk on this list, I have my list of things I'd like
> to see someone research.  Tell us a bit more and I am sure you'll get lots
> of us to share.
>

That's the hope.  =)

-Brett