Mark Miller just published his dissertation: Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control informed by his years of work on the capability-secure E programming language. Great stuff, very relevant to the future of highly distributed, concurrent and secure computing, i.e., the future of computing, and pretty readable too — I blinked and momentarily misread the heading “Reference Graph Dynamics” (numbered page 66) as “Reference Graphs for Dummies.” I’ve only skimmed the document, but Part III, Concurrency Control, looks the most interesting and hardest, while Part IV, Emergent Robustness should be accessible and thought provoking to anyone with marginal technical literacy.

Also very recently Marc Stiegler announced a draft of Emily in a Walnut, a gentle introduction for imperative programmers to a secure variant of OCaml. Using Objective Caml for something interesting has been somewhere down my list for several years and will probably remain for several more.