On Ceremonies of Loss (An Obituary)
About three weeks ago I went down the shore to attended my maternal grandmother's burial. She was my last living grandparent and died in fall 2020.
Blog
DSL Usability Research
In my previous post, I asserted:
...learning a new formal language can itself contribute to the difficulty of encoding an experiment.
This statement was based on assumptions, intuitions, and folk wisdom. I started digging into the DSL usability research to see if I could find explicit support for this statement. This blog post is about what I found.
Jupyter DSLs
One of the broader goals of the Helical project is to make writing, maintaining, and debugging experiments easier and safer for the end-user through a novel domain-specific language. However, learning a new formal language can itself contribute to the difficulty of encoding an experiment. Therefore, we are intersted in mitigating the effects of language learning/novelty. To this end, a Northeastern coop student (Kevin G. Yang) investigated the suitability of using Jupyter notebooks as an execution environment for experiments last year.
New student, new project!
I want to extend a belated welcome to Zixuan (Jason) Yu, a Northeastern University undergraduate student who is working with me on a research coop through December 2025. Jason's project focuses on identifying elements of the Mastodon code base where we might either want to intervene (in order to answer a research question) or where there might be associated privacy considerations.
Reproduction vs. Replication
In 2020 or so, ACM swapped its definitions of reproducibility and replicability to be more in line with the broader social sciences community. I see the reasoning for the swap, but I don't think that the new definition is quite right either. The crux of the issue is that definitions both communities are using are a shorthand that doesn't map appropriately across communities.