Ashton Wiersdorf #

I am a PhD student at the University of Utah, where I started in August 2022. I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in computer science from Brigham Young University in April 2022.

I am interested in researching and designing better programming languages. Programming languages are our interface to computation, and different programming languages shape how we think about solving problems with computation. I have done research around compilers and static analysis, and going forward I will be working on novel type systems to catch new kinds of errors and to make programming more intuitive for beginners.
Contact #
- Email: blog@lambdaland.org
- Matrix: @ashton:matrix.lambdaland.org
You can download my public PGP key here.
You can also find me on these platforms, though I might not answer quickly:
Work #
I am part of the PLT @ University of Utah research group. See our work on GitHub.
Presentations #
- Ashton Wiersdorf. 2023. FlowFPX: Nimble tools for debugging floating-point exceptions. In JuliaCon 2023. Boston Massachusetts USA.
- Talk recording (for some reason, the slides look really yellow in the recording)
- Slides (PDF; 22M)
- Slideshow (Keynote → HTML export)
Projects #
- FloatTracker.jl
- Julia library providing tracking of floating point errors through a program resources.
Personal projects #
- Type inference with errors
- Type inference for a small lambda calculus with decent error messages.
- μKanren
- Walk through of the μKanren embedded logic language.
- Emacs Bedrock
- A minimalist Emacs starter kit focused on built-in functionality and discoverability aids.
- Nordic Night
- A darker, higher-contrast spin on the lovely Nord theme for Emacs.
- lambda-x86
- My first compiler, which compiles a small Lisp to x86.