London 2012
Working Group on Language Design
The first official meeting of IFIP TC2 WG2.16 was held in London Feb 27 - Mar 2 2012 at Imperial College, hosted by Susan Eisenbach. The general post-meeting consensus was that we succeeded in having a rich and interesting discussion, and that the format was an improvement over the inaugural meeting. Suggestions for further refinements are encouraged on the mailing list.
See PlanningLondon2012 for the pre-meeting plans.
Themes and Memes
An emergent theme of discussion was the evaluation of programming language designs. We had wide-ranging perspectives including hard empiricism, mathematical elegance, and critical design theory. We started work on a joint manifesto: The Kensington Criteria. Tijs van der Storm gave a talk on "language design smells" in which he proposed an initial taxonomy. Talk of such smells repeatedly arose in later discussions, particularly William Cook's "everything is an x" smell. We are looking forward to continuing the conversation at Austin2012.Participants
| Name | Talk | Slides |
|---|---|---|
| Jonathan Aldrich | Permission-Based Programming | Aldrich.pdf? |
| William R. Cook | Managed Data: Rolling You Own Data Structuring Mechanism | |
| Sophia Drossopoulou | Trust the Clones; Zeno | Drossopoulouclones.pdf? Drossopoulouzeno.pdf? |
| Jonathan Edwards | Problems of Application Programming | Edwards.pdf? |
| Susan Eisenbach | Shared Memory Concurrency: Lock Inference | Eisenbach.pdf? |
| Erik Ernst | Working with stack intervals rather than invocations, applied to data structure traversal | |
| Stefan Hanenberg | Controlled experiments for the empirical evaluation of programming language constructs: type systems as an example | Hanenberg.pdf? |
| Magne Haveraaen | Can I reason about the code? | |
| Robert Hirschfeld | Design Research and Programming | Hirschfeld.pdf? |
| Roberto Ierusalimschy | Small is Beautiful: the design of LUA | Ierusalimschy.pdf? |
| Daan Leijen | Koka | |
| Jan-Willem Maessen | Bulk Operations on Indexed Collections | Maessen.pdf? |
| Sean McDirmid | Escape from the maze of twisty classes | McDirmid.pdf? |
| James Noble | State of Grace | Noble.pdf? |
| Tijs van der Storm | Language Design Smells | Storm.pdf? |
| Don Syme | Information Rich Programming | |
| Tom Van Cutsem | Evolution in programming language design? | VanCutsem.pdf? |
| Eelco Visser | Spoofax language workbench (demonstration) | Spoofax |