[PL-sem-jr] Proposed change to the format of PL Junior

[Sam Caldwell]

During the planning meeting today we discussed the issues with PL
Junior from last semester and how to address them. Since not everyone
could make it to the meeting, we need everyone's agreement and input
to the discussion before changing the format.

The proposal is essentially to spit the semester into a small number
of foundational topics where we spend more than one week on each
topic.

One of the purposes of PL Junior is to fill in the gaps in our
background knowledge, particularly on foundational parts of PL. The
current (last semester's) format fails to live up to this goal for
several reasons. In my opinion, the primary reason is that one lecture
is insufficient to pick up a useful amount of knowledge in a rich
area. Only the presenter, who is required to put in the work to
understand the material well enough to present it, really benefits.

In this spirit, we came up with several potential topics:
- Static Analysis, Type Theory, or Type Systems
- (Denotational) Semantics
- Pragmatics - Memory Management, Runtime Systems
- Logic and other Mathematical Foundations

As a side note, we still want to finish up discussions of the
remaining 10PL papers.

Going forward, we need to decide
1) do we want to change the format?
2) if we do change, we need to pick and schedule the topics.
3) if we keep the current format we still need to assign speaking slots.

Cheers,
Sam Caldwell
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