Everything Is a Program (Even If It's Not) (Keynote)

A brief discussion at a conference more than 15 years ago led to a collaborative research agenda that has been incredibly fun, intellectually challenging, and impactful. Internet protocols like BGP and DNS underlie everything that we do online, but they routinely break network security and reliability due to their complexity and fragility. While there are many moving parts and underlying causes, time and again the programming languages perspective has proven to be a powerful way to make progress. In short, everything is a program (even if it’s not), and once something is a program we can give it a precise semantics and bring to bear a host of techniques to reason about its behavior. I’ll illustrate this approach through examples from my work, but the ideas are applicable beyond computer networks. I’ll also distill some general lessons that I’ve learned about doing collaborative research and making an impact.