[Python-Dev] Ph.D. dissertation ideas? (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Fri Jan 13 01:58:20 CET 2006

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

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list