Ashton Wiersdorf

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.

My most recent place of employment outside of academia was with Spiff Inc., where they were nice enough to let me hack on their interpreter. Before Spiff I worked at a few other positions as a full-stack engineer.

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 #

You can download my public PGP key here.

You can also find me on these platforms, though I might not answer quickly:

Publications #

None yet—stay tuned though!

Small 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.
lambda-x86
My first compiler, which compiles a small Lisp to x86.