Dynamic Languages Symposium 2006 - Technical Papers

Portland, Oregon, United States, October 23, 2006

Presentations of invited talks available at http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls06/.

Program

8:30 - 9:30	Invited Talk 1
	Openness and simplicity in dynamic systems implementation Ian Piumarta
9:30 - 10:00	Break
10:00 - 11:30	Research Papers 1
	PyPy's Approach to Virtual Machine Construction Armin Rigo and Samuele Pedroni Runtime Synthesis of High-Performance Code from Scripting Languages Christopher Mueller and Andrew Lumsdaine Interlanguage Migration: From Scripts to Programs Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Matthias Felleisen
11:30 - 13:00	Break
13:00 - 14:00	Invited Talk 2
	Perl 6 Audrey Tang
14:00 - 14:30	Break
14:30 - 16:00	Research Papers 2
	Hop, a Language for Programming the Web 2.0 Manuel Serrano, Erick Gallesio, and Florian Loitsch Ambient References: Addressing Objects in Mobile Networks Tom Van Cutsem, Jessie Dedecker, Stijn Mostinckx, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Theo D'Hondt, and Wolfgang De Meuter Hardware Transactional Memory Support for Lightweight Dynamic Language Evolution Nicholas Riley and Craig Zilles
16:00 - 16:15	Short Break
16:15 - 17:15	Invited Talk 3
	Data Refactoring for Amateurs Avi Bryant

Invited Talks

Openness and simplicity in dynamic systems implementation
Ian Piumarta

The talk will describe a basis for constructing systems (programming languages, environments and applications) in which users can be encouraged to adapt the characteristics of the system to match their needs (rather than the other way round). Such systems can be evolved from a pair of abstractions for state (objects communicating by messaging) and behaviour (first-class functions) that are mutually supporting: objects form structures representing symbolic expressions that fully describe the message sequencing and sending that are needed to implement objects. The result is extreme late-binding (nothing in the system is immune from dynamic modification) and extreme simplicity (each abstraction can be written down in a handful of lines of mathematics, and only slightly more lines of code).

Ian Piumarta is a computer scientist at Viewpoints Research Institute. He spends much of his time designing and building systems whose implementations are maximally open, reflexive, dynamically self-describing and understandable. He can be contacted at squeakland dot org.

Perl 6
Audrey Tang

Perl is a general-purpose language, known for its vast number of freely available libraries. The Perl 6 project was started to improve the language's support for multi-paradigmatic programming, while retaining compatibility with the existing code base. This talk discusses how Perl 6 attempts to reconcile various competing paradigms in the field of programming language design, such as static vs. dynamic typechecking, nominal vs. structural subtyping, prototype vs. class-based objects, and lazy vs. eager evaluation. Moreover, this talk also covers the design and development of Pugs, a self-hosting Perl 6 implementation bootstrapped from Haskell, targeting multiple runtime environments, including Perl 5, JavaScript and Parrot.

Audrey Tang is a Taiwanese free software programmer, best known for initiating and leading the Pugs project, a joint effort from Haskell and Perl communities to implement the Perl 6 language. She is also known for internationalization and localization contributions to several Free Software programs, including SVK, Kwiki, Request Tracker and Slash, as well as heading Traditional Chinese translation efforts for various Open Source-related books. On the CPAN, Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5. She is also responsible for setting up smoke test and digital signature systems for CPAN. Tang is a high school dropout and a vocal proponent for autodidacticism and individualist anarchism.

Data Refactoring for Amateurs
Avi Bryant

Agile software development methodologies such as Extreme Programming advocate iterative design via incremental, test-driven code extension and automated refactorings. When the goal is to allow non-developers to build their own solutions, even in a limited way, this approach to incrementality becomes even more important -- non-developers generally have even less of the design experience necessary to make reasonable decisions up front, and need real use and concrete examples to guide their decisions. Dabble DB is a commercial data management tool aimed at casual business users. It encourages users to evolve data models slowly over time, starting with untyped and de-normalized models and proceeding to more sophisticated models only as the need becomes apparent. We introduce a set of data refactorings designed to support this usage pattern, and show selected examples of their real-world use.

Avi Bryant is the co-CEO of Smallthought Systems Inc., a Vancouver startup focused on web-based collaboration tools. He is the author and maintainer of the Seaside web application framework, and is active in the open source Squeak Smalltalk community.

Call for papers

The Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at OOPSLA 2006 is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, and Prolog continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications. DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.

The Technical Papers track of DLS 2006 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the OOPSLA conference companion and the ACM Digital Library.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

Reflection and meta-programming
Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
Actors and active objects
Innovative language features and implementation techniques
Development and platform support, tools
Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
Experience reports and case studies
Interesting applications
Educational approaches and perspectives
Domain-oriented programming
Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming

Submissions and proceedings

We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.

Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls2006/ in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Important dates

Submission of papers (hard deadline):	June 1, 2006 (Thursday)
Author notification:	July 1, 2006 (Saturday)
Final version due:	July 11, 2006 (Tuesday)
DLS:	October 23, 2006 (Monday)

Program chair

Robert Hirschfeld
Hasso-Plattner-Institut, University of Potsdam, Germany
hirschfeld@acm.org

Program committee

David Ascher, ActiveState, Canada
Gilad Bracha, Sun Microsystems, United States
Pascal Costanza, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Richard P. Gabriel, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, United States
Robert Hirschfeld, HPI, University of Potsdam, Germany (chair)
David Leibs, Advanced Micro Devices, United States
Wolfgang De Meuter, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Stephane Ducasse, Université de Savoie, France
Oscar Nierstrasz, University of Berne, Switzerland
Ian Piumarta, Viewpoints Research Institute, United States
David Simmons, Microsoft, United States
Michael Sperber, University of Tübingen, Germany
Dave Thomas, Bedarra Research Labs, Canada
Martin von Löwis, HPI, University of Potsdam, Germany
Jon L White, United States
Allen Wirfs-Brock, Microsoft, United States
Roel Wuyts, Unversité Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium