The past week or so I've been trying to deal with all sorts of smaller things in the hope that I can concentrate on my dissertation research afterward.

Probably the most interesting things I've been up to are learning the Scala language. In some ways it has been a little strange as I think I may actually have a better understanding of the language from a technical standpoint than a practical one. Specifically, I am still trying to figure out how to gracefully combine functional programming with algebraic datatypes with nominal objects and inheritence. In some regards, mutability is more pervasive in a object-oriented setting.

Additionally I've started using the Scala Eclipse plugin along with the Subversion plugin. Which I've found very impressive. I haven't tried using the standard Java mode to compare, as I understand the Scala plugin is still in the early stages of development. But even just the fact that it rebuilds dependencies as soon as I save a file, and hilighting the lines with errors is an amazing time saver. Additionally the tools for browsing revision history are vastly more useful than trying to figure the same things out from the command-line.

In other news, after considerable debate an qualitative analysis, the mechanized metatheory group here at Penn has decided to narrow our focus down to Coq. So Stephanie will be using Coq for all the assignments in her special topics course this fall, and in general we will be working on developing libraries and tactics to support our development and perhaps write some additional tools.