Dan Bentley on Build Systems a la Carte [PWL NYC]

I love this paper because it explores a topic that rarely gets academic attention: build systems (such as Make). It takes a confused landscape and finds a meta-model that even the authors of those tools didn't comprehend. It makes a convincing argument that Excel (!!) is a build system. And it does it all with a healthy dose of functional programming/category theory.

I'll try to recap the paper, in terminology and figures that can make sense to users, not just functional programmers. I'll also try and lay out unexplored territory and questions I'm left with.



Authors: Andrey Mokhov, Neil Mitchell, Simon Peyton Jones

Paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/resea...


Dan Bentley is a Software Engineer who's currently CEO of Tilt. Tilt's a startup building a Distributed Developer Experience, aka Make for Microservices. Previously, he worked at Google on a build tool that was a predecessor to Bazel, Open Source, and Google Sheets. He's opened for The Who and has received two checks from Donald Knuth.


Papers We Love NYC would like to thank Datadog (https://www.datadoghq.com/) for making this meetup possible.

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• #paperswelove
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• #bazel