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 |
|---|
| Erik Ernst | Working with stack intervals rather than invocations, applied to data structure traversal | |
| Sophia Drossopoulou | Trust the Clones; Zeno | Drossopoulouclones.pdf? Drossopoulouzeno.pdf? |
| James Noble | State of Grace | Noble.pdf? |
| Eelco Visser | Spoofax language workbench (demonstration) | Spoofax |
| Roberto Ierusalimschy | Small is Beautiful: the design of LUA | Ierusalimschy.pdf? |
| Susan Eisenbach | Shared Memory Concurrency: Lock Inference | Eisenbach.pdf? |
| Jonathan Edwards | Problems of Application Programming | Edwards.pdf? |
| Jonathan Aldrich | Permission-Based Programming | Aldrich.pdf? |
| William R. Cook | Managed Data: Rolling You Own Data Structuring Mechanism | |
| Tijs van der Storm | Language Design Smells | Storm.pdf? |
| Daan Leijen | Koka | |
| Don Syme | Information Rich Programming | |
| Tom Van Cutsem | Evolution in programming language design? | VanCutsem.pdf? |
| Sean McDirmid | Escape from the maze of twisty classes | McDirmid.pdf? |
| Robert Hirschfeld | Design Research and Programming | Hirschfeld.pdf? |
| 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? | |
| Jan-Willem Maessen | Bulk Operations on Indexed Collections | Maessen.pdf? |
--
JonathanEdwards - 05 Mar 2012
