Farhad Mehta

Professor for Programming Languages and Software Engineering at OST, Switzerland

Farhad Mehta belongs to a generation that made its first programming experiences in a functional language, and secretly grieves over the passing of those times. He believes that functional programming has the potential to make software less complex and more fun to write. He has worked in this area at INRIA in Paris (the home of OCaml and Coq), TU Münich (the home of Isabelle/HOL), and the ETH Zürich. He is currently a Professor in Computer Science at the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, where he, among other things, teaches Functional Programming and co-organizes the yearly ZuriHac conference since 2017.

Hoogle for the Hungry Masses!

Hoogle is a type-based search engine for Haskell APIs. You give it an approximate type signature, and it will give you all library functions that match this type. Developers who get used to it miss something similar when switching to other programming languages. But non-Haskellers deserve good things too!

In this talk, I will introduce and demonstrate TypeSearch, a way to perform type-directed API search that can potentially be used for almost any typed programming language. I will also lift the hood to touch on how this problem was solved in an elegant and language-independent way using inspiration from the Curry-Howard correspondence, and how solving this problem in a more general setting also gives us code synthesis for free.

Attribution: Hoogle is the work of Niel Mitchell. TypeSearch is joint work with Marc Etter.

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