Mayer Goldberg's Homepage

1. Contact Information
2. Research
3. Teaching
4. Departmental duties
5. Personal Interests
6. Hey, where's the old website??

Everybody seems to understand that astronomers do astronomy because astronomy is interesting. Why don't they understand that I do computer science because computer science is interesting? And that I'd do it regardless of whether or not it made money for anybody?

— Donald E. Knuth

1 Contact Information

Email: gmayer@little-lisper.org. All email, from all other accounts, gets forwarded to this account.
Office: Building 37 (Alon, אלון) room 106, mailbox 44
Office hours (for the Spring Semester 2014): Sundays, 14:00-16:00
Telephones: Voice (+972)(0)8-647-7873, FAX (+972)(0)8-647-7650
Professional mailing address: Mayer Goldberg, Department of Computer Science, Ben Gurion University, PO Box 653, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel.
Personal mailing address: Mayer & Sharon Goldberg, PO Box 15161, Beer Sheva, 84121, Israel

2 Research

Research Interests
- Proof Assistants (Coq, nuprl, et cetera)
- The Lambda Calculus
- Programming Languages
- Functional Programming
- Object-Oriented Programming
- Computational Reflection
- Continuations & Control
- Interpretation & Compilation
- Automated theorem proving (Coq, NuPRL, etc)
Research Students
1. Present research students
2. Past research students
  - Valery Frolov (MSc, expected 2012)
  - Guy Wiener (PhD, 2012)
  - Sonia Margulis (MSc, 2011)
  - Avi Shefi (MSc, 2009)
  - Yelena Lev (MSc, 2008)
  - Yigal Greenshpun (MSc, 2007)
  - Guy Wiener (MSc, 2007)
  - Assaf Shemesh (MSc, 2006)

3 Teaching

4 Departmental duties

Freshman teaching committee

5 Personal Interests

6 Hey, where's the old website??

For several years now, I have been "growing" (for want of a better word) a huge website (over 3,500 pages), containing massive amounts of information. The website was convenient to create, somewhat convenient to manage, and the students hated it. The website was created semi-automatically by a program called The Brain. The program is very useful knowledge management system, and I suppose that deployment to the web was never a priority for the guys who wrote the Brain. Despite many requests, they were not quick to fix bugs in the website generation parts of their system, and were even slower to add features. Websites created using the Brain were very demanding in terms resources of the web browsers, could not be annotated with keywords, did not lend themselves to a simple creation of a sitemap, and Google did its best to ignore them.

I struggled for a while to maintain my Brain-based website despite many serious objections, not the least of which were the objections of my students, most of whom hated the way it looked. A graphical, Javascript-intensive, resource hungry website that didn't look or feel good on the limited browsers of the phones and ebook readers that are now as much a part of my life as they are of the lives of my students.

So there you have it. The Brain-based website had to go. This site is still very very rudimentary. I have great plans for it though. If you miss anything that appeared on the old website, just drop me an email, and I'll up its priority in the migration plan for the new site.

So what am I using now? Why, Emacs of course! One important lesson I learned from my experience with the Brain is that I must control my own toolchain, and I must keep things very simple. No commercial vendor is going to listen to my suggestions and needs as… myself! Emacs, make, rsync. I'll obviously be adding tons of Scheme scripts later on. Stay tuned! ☺