Franklyn Turbak

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, where I teach, and do research on, programming languages. My main interest is the exploration of programming languages as a means of expressing ideas and communicating knowledge. I am especially interested in the use of programming languages as educational tools and in the development of new ways to increase the expressive power of programming languages. Other interests include program visualization and virtual communities for math and science education.

Current projects include:

• The Church Project : Developing a typed functional language based on intersection types (in collaboration with a seminar group based at Boston University).
• Slivers: Decomposing computations into modular parts that preserve operational properties like time and space complexity.
• Writing a textbook based on MIT's graduate programming languages course (6.821) (in collaboration with Professor David Gifford and Brian Reistad).
• Robot-Based Design Projects: Developing robot design activities for a liberal arts environment (in collaboration with Robbie Berg and Ruth Chuang at Wellesley). Our latest creation is SciBorg, pictured below:

  

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:

• First-Class Synchronization Barriers, by Franklyn Turbak. Draft of a paper to appear at ICFP '96.
• Synchronized Lazy Aggregates, by Franklyn Turbak. Draft of a technical memo based on my dissertation.
• Slivers: Computational Modularity via Synchronized Lazy Aggregates, by Franklyn Turbak. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 1994.
• "Creatures of Habit: A Computational System to Enhance and Illuminate the Development of Scientific Thinking", by Roy Pea, Michael Eisenberg, and Franklyn Turbak. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988.
• "Understanding Procedures as Objects", by Michael Eisenberg, Mitchel Resnick, and Franklyn Turbak. In Gary M. Olson, Sylvia Sheppard, and Elliot Soloway, Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop,. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1987.
• "Intelligent Information-Sharing Systems", by Thomas Malone, Kenneth Grant, Franklyn Turbak, Stephen Brobst, and Michael Cohen. Communications of the ACM, May 1987.
• "The Information Lens: An Intelligent System for Information Sharing in Organizations", by Thomas Malone, Kenneth Grant, and Franklyn Turbak. In Proceedings of the CHI'86 Human Factors in Computing Conference. ACM, 1986.
• Grasp: A Visible and Manipulable Model for Procedural Programs, by Franklyn Turbak. S.M. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1986.