Idiot-proof computer programming

Idiot-proof computer programming

A computer scientist at Victoria University of Wellington is part of an international team that has designed a way to overcome problems that occur when using multiple programming languages to write webpages.

Dr Alex Potanin, a senior lecturer at Victoria’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, has helped design Wyvern, a piece of software that allows many different programming languages to be used at the same time.

Dr Potanin helped develop Wyvern while on sabbatical in 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He and the rest of the research group set out to design a system which makes it possible to use a variety of targeted, domain-specific programming languages—such as HTML or SQL—within a single programme.

“When you programme for the web at the moment you use many different languages—it’s a bit of a mish-mash,” says Dr Potanin.

Wyvern can simplify the process by establishing which language is being used within the programme based on the type of data the programmer is using.

“Currently these different languages are designed without taking into account that the others exist, so you write a programme and you only find out there’s an error when you try to run it and it doesn’t work.

“We’re bridging this gap by combining this mish-mash into a single underlying language that is easy to use. Our design means on one hand you are writing in a language that is comfortable to you but underneath it translates to the core single language that is checked for errors.”

Dr Potanin says Wyvern also helps avoid major security threats that can arise when using a range of programming languages.

“A code injection is a common security bug which is caused by processing invalid data. In can be exploited by an attacker to inject code, with potentially disastrous results,” he says. “The only way you can avoid it is to manually inspect the code. But Wyvern will not allow you to mix the wrong things—it’s idiot proof.

“Also, because this is a language that’s designed from scratch, we can build security into it from a fundamental level. With other programming languages it’s usually an afterthought and designers try to fit security policies retrospectively.”

The team’s work was recognised at an international conference recently – the research team won a distinguished paper award at the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming in Sweden for their article ‘Safely Composable Type-Specific Languages’.

CMU is the top-ranked university in the United States for Computer Science, which Dr Potanin says makes for exciting collaboration prospects for Victoria students.

“We’re looking for students here to work on Wyvern—this is a great opportunity to join forces with such an internationally-renowned institution.”

To find out more about Wyvern, go to http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/wyvern/

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