Graham Hutton

Just a few days left now to register for the Midlands Graduate School (MGS)! Eight fantastic courses on type theory, category theory, lambda calculus and more. 13-17 April 2026, Nottingham, UK. Registration closes Sunday 22nd March. Please share! tinyurl.com/MGS-2026

@4ndr3lu15_ @zacgarby The paper is here: arxiv.org/abs/2602.20064

Great to have Andy Gordon visit the FP lab today and give a talk on his work with @zacgarby and Dave Sands on the LLMbda calculus!

Registration is now open for the Midlands Graduate School (MGS) in Nottingham! Eight fantastic courses on type theory, category theory, lambda calculus, and more. 13-17 April 2026, Nottingham, UK. Registration closes Sunday 22nd March. Please share! tinyurl.com/MGS-2026

@Artisharma1123 @JohnnyPusztai No ghee involved - just a standard beef bourguignon recipe.

@haskellhutt @JohnnyPusztai It looks really delicious and tempting. Could you please tell me if that is ghee poured on top of it?

Haven't made beef bourguignon in ages, but the lost-in-time days between xmas and new year is a perfect chance to have another go. It took most of the day, but worked out really well. Many thanks to our local butcher @JohnnyPusztai for the excellent beef!

@satnam6502 Our youngest son T also has a Paulin and loves it. Check out Anordain too, which is from the same company but a bit more fancy dials.

Adult watch on, in preparation for meeting fellow Paulin Glasgow devotees tonight.

@headinthebox Similarly, funding agencies should sprinkle smaller amounts of money around rather than spending huge amounts on big projects. The game changing ideas usually come from one person having a good idea rather than big projects.

That is the best strategy and how all great products get born. Then when the bureaucrats, bean counters, and regulators come marching it, all bottom up innovation dies, and is replaced by centrally planned big bets. Which by definition will fail. Proof at Meta: HHVM vs Reality Labs.

@headinthebox I still take pleasure in manually formatting my code. I also like to make sure my latex source looks nice, even if nobody else ever sees it. Simple pleasures :-)

If you still get upset about code formatting in 2026, you are a true fossil.

@Anthony_Bonato the only subject with results that can be true for eternity.

Finish this sentence: Mathematics is ...

@BrandonHewer There's now a video too! youtube.com/live/i5vlcNRh1…

Delighted that "Quotient Polymorphism" has received a distinguished paper award at #POPL2026 - great work @BrandonHewer! doi.org/10.1145/3776665

@MartinSLewis Not working is an important part of working. So many people these days don't switch off properly from work during the evenings and at weekends. Taking proper breaks is important for keeping fresh, and keeping sane!

TELL US: What life lessons have you learnt that you’d want to tell an equivalent to your younger self leaving school or university now - whether its money issues, work issues or any others Please reply here. Like your faves, and podcast producer Matt will collate to be read out

@satnam6502 I was offered a developer position with Linn -- one of the best hi-fi manufacturers in the world -- in 1988, but decided to do a PhD at the University of Glasgow instead. I have often wondered how my career might have been different had I accepted the Linn position.

I was offered a PhD position with Prof. Milner at the University of Edinburgh in 1987, but declined it to go to the University of Glasgow instead. I have often wondered how my career might have been different had I accepted the Edinburgh PhD position.

@headinthebox It's perhaps worthy of note that the pyramids are still standing after 1000s of years, but houses built using modern methods are lucky to last 100 years :-)

By the end of 2026, we’ll look at Excel, Windows, Linux, Z3, ... the way we look at the pyramids or Machu Picchu: how on earth did the ancients build monumental software like that without AI?

@Anthony_Bonato I was taught logic at university by someone who used Greek letters for everything, which pretty much made the whole course incomprehensible for people such as myself who had little exposure to these before. I always remember this experience when teaching myself.

Anyone popularizing math or putting out math content quickly realizes that 99% of people shut down if you use n or k or any letters for numbers

@headinthebox "Computer scientists do not know their literature" (Erik Meijer, PhD thesis propositions, 1992)

On-the-fly Garbage Collection: an Exercise in Cooperation Edsger W. Dijkstra, Leslie Lamport, A. J. Martin, C. S. Scholten, E. F. M. Steffens Communications of the ACM 21 | November 1978 , Vol 11: pp. 966-975 We know how to do concurrent GC since 1978, that for nearly 50 years. Why on earth is Claude Code still doing stop & copy in 2026?

@functi0nZer0 I’m already taken - sorry to disappoint.

Maybe this is just a function of my being older, but imo if you can’t work out that someone you hang out with every day is into you without it being said, that’s a skill issue on your end

@headinthebox And then read about Improvements for Free - how parametricty also gives program optimisations, not just program equivalences! people.cs.nott.ac.uk/pszgmh/pfc.pdf

December is already half over, time to start the annual re-read of Theorems for Free! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/99…

UK CS folks: this years Midlands Graduate School Christmas Seminars will be held on the afternoon of Tuesday 16th December 2025 at the University of Birmingham. Please share! mgs-xmas25.vercel.app

Such a great F1 season and fantastic to see a British driver winning in a British car!