Historically, the fields of programming languages and networking have operated in relative isolation: applications run on end hosts and communicate with each other using standard network protocols. However, the landscape has changed significantly in the past decade, driven by the needs of large-scale systems and the emergence of programmable network hardware. Today, it is possible to design and implement custom network protocols and even to relocate application-level functionality into the network fabric. This talk will discuss the pivotal role that programming languages are playing in modern networks, highlighting how experiences designing domain-specific abstractions and reasoning tools for networks can provide fresh insights for the field of programming languages, too.

Nate Foster is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and a Visiting Researcher at Jane Street. During the 2023-24 academic year he is also a Visiting Professor at EPFL in the Data Center Systems Laboratory. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, and ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Award.