Franklyn Turbak

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, where I teach, and do research on, programming languages. My interests include the design and implementation of expressive programming languages and the visualization of computational processes.

Current projects include:

• Developing a typed-directed compiler based on flow types with other members of The Church Project .
• Decomposing computations into modular parts called slivers that preserve time and space complexity.
• Working with Robbie Berg to develop a Robotic Design Studio course that engages liberal arts students in robot design activities.

My hero is Captain Abstraction, champion of the principles of abstraction and modularity, who protects unwary programmers from the nefarious designs of Sergeant Spaghetticode and his vile concrete programming practices.

Papers:

• Franklyn Turbak, Allyn Dimock, Robert Muller, and J. B. Wells. Compiling with Polymorphic and Polyvariant Flow Types. In Proceedings of the Types in Compilation Workshop , Amsterdam, June 8, 1997.
• Allyn Dimock, Robert Muller, Franklyn Turbak, and J. B. Wells. Strongly Typed Flow-Directed Representation Transformations. In Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming.
• J. B. Wells, Allyn Dimock, Robert Muller, and Franklyn Turbak. A Typed Intermediate Language for Flow-Directed Compilation. In Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on the Theory and Practice of Software Development (TAPSOFT '97). Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1997.
• Franklyn Turbak. First-Class Synchronization Barriers. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming.
• Franklyn Turbak. Slivers: Computational Modularity via Synchronized Lazy Aggregates. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 1994.
• Roy Pea, Michael Eisenberg, and Franklyn Turbak. Creatures of Habit: A Computational System to Enhance and Illuminate the Development of Scientific Thinking. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988.
• Michael Eisenberg, Mitchel Resnick, and Franklyn Turbak. Understanding Procedures as Objects. In Gary M. Olson, Sylvia Sheppard, and Elliot Soloway, Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop,. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1987.
• Thomas Malone, Kenneth Grant, Franklyn Turbak, Stephen Brobst, and Michael Cohen. Intelligent Information-Sharing Systems. Communications of the ACM, May 1987.
• Thomas Malone, Kenneth Grant, and Franklyn Turbak. "The Information Lens: An Intelligent System for Information Sharing in Organizations". In Proceedings of the CHI'86 Human Factors in Computing Conference. ACM, 1986.
• Franklyn Turbak. Grasp: A Visible and Manipulable Model for Procedural Programs, S.M. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1986.