Welcome!

This is the first in what I hope will be many blog posts on the relationship between experimentation and programming languages.

First, the meta: there are two ways to categorize the work that this blog will cover. One is by the methods used: this work exists at the intersection of formal and empirical research methods and so some posts will be quite technical, focusing on formal language design, logic, causal inference, and general "mathiness." In a lot of ways, this isn't particularly useful information: we might as well say we are "doing science," since empirical and formal methods describe a lot of the tools we use to generate scientific knowledge. On the other hand, that framing distinguishes the goals of this work from ordinary academic scientific activity, where we typically use a small set of methods for a specialized set of domains, which leads us to the observation that...

The other way to categorize this work is by application area. We are broadly interested in "systems," which is a general word to describe objects in the world that interact with each other. We are specifically interested in computer-mediated systems, which range from sociotechnical systems like Mastodon and social games, to typical computer systems like databases, operating systems, or programming frameworks. These application areas provide contexts in which we can evaluate the methods we study, while also providing inspiration for the methodological problems we address.