MSR internship and some retrospection
I feel I can finally write about: I got accepted for a three-month internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge! This means I will be developing GHC and, hopefully, doing some serious research on the subject of functional programming and compiler implementation. My internship starts tomorrow, on 1st July. I’m not yet 100% certain about the exact topic of my research, so I’ll refrain from going into any kind of technical details for now and I will focus on my personal experience with functional programming. I feel this is really a good moment to summarize the past 1,5 year. I learned about functional programming at the very beginning of 2012 and since then I progressed from knowing completely nothing to being in Cambridge - something I would have not imagined 18 months ago.
Somewhere around July 2011 I finished writing my PhD. I had yet to deal with many formalities - which in the end took 8 months - but the most important part of my work was done and I only continued research on a few minor subjects that I ran into while writing a PhD. Somewhere in October I decided I need a break from all my current research topic - I finally wanted some time to pursue topics that interested me all along and for which I never had time. Compiler construction and theory of automata were two main topics I had in mind. That was the plan, but it wasn’t meant to work out, at least not yet. Somewhere around December 2012 I stumbled upon a book “Seven languages in seven weeks”, which was my first contact with functional programming. I didn’t follow the book exactly. I read chapters about Ruby, Io, Prolog (so much fun!), Scala and Erlang, but instead of reading chapter about Clojure I went for Scheme. I read R5RS language specification and The Little Schemer and when I reached the chapter about Haskell I decided to read Learn You A Haskell instead. At that point I already knew that Haskell is the functional programming language and I think that this was the moment I started having some serious plans about functional programming. But at the same time I was figuring out how to learn about compilers. It was April when Stanford University announced their two online courses on Compilers and Automata and these were really godsend. The Compilers course ended in late June. This concludes my first six months of contact with FP and I think that these months were extremely intense. I learned theoretical and practical foundations of compilers, a new programming paradigm and some new languages designed in that paradigm. I also started reading research papers on functional programming, with a focus on implementation of GHC. At that point I didn’t even try to work on the source code, but I was trying to understand how the compiler is designed.
The next six months, from July to December, were not as fruitful. I picked up interest in doing data-parallel computations in Haskell, as this seemed to be an active topic of research and also related to my PhD work. I made a failed attempt of an efficient parallel implementation of a wavelet transform. Although I wasn’t successful, my time was not wasted: I learned how to write, test and benchmark libraries in Haskell and also read a lot of papers on FP. I also got in touch with Ben Lippmeier, who pointed me to one problem with GHC he needed fixed. This was somewhere in January 2013. I already started reading the source code of GHC in December, but now I finally had a particular problem to solve. It was the time to start working on GHC. That is mostly what I did during the last six months, although I also managed to spend some time on theory (more papers and a book on combinatory logic).
As for the internship, I decided to apply for it in February. I polished my CV and cover letter (many thanks go to my friend Marek for his help) and sent my application at the beginning of March. After an interview with Geoffrey Mainland and Simon Peyton Jones I got acceptance notification at the beginning of April. And here I am in Cambridge, over 1300km from home, waiting for my first day at Microsoft Research.