Aarhus 2013
Working Group on Language Design
The fourth meeting is planned:
- Dates: Wed, August 21 - Sun, August 25, 2013
- Venue: University Aarhus, Denmark
- Host: Erik Ernst
Participants
Top row: Jonathan Edwards, Ronald Garcia, James Noble, Erik Ernst, Crista Lopes, John Hughes, Leo Meyerovich, Robby Findler
Bottom row: Eelco Visser, Tijs van der Storm, Stefan Hanenberg, Laurie Tratt, Yannis Smaragdakis, Adam Chlipala
More photos of this and previous WGLD meetings can be found in our
flickr group.
Proceedings
The following talks were given during the meeting:
- Introductions
- Jonathan Edwards: Dynamic → Static
- Tijs van der Storm: Abstract Syntax Sucks!?
- Robby Findler: 2D syntax
- Lars Bak (special guest from Google): Dart
- Stefan Hanenberg: Experiment with Dart typing
- Erik Ernst: Relevance in Programming Languages?
- John Hughes: QuickCheck your language design?
- Crista Lopes: Exercises in Style
- Yannis Smaragdakis: Forsaking Inheritance: Supercharged Delegation in DelphJ?
- James Noble: Object Capabilities?
- Leo Meyerovich: The Social Design of Graphistry
- Adam Chlipala: Feature-Level Modularity in Ur/Web?
- Ron Garcia: Gradual Effects
- Stefan Hanenberg: A survey of experimental research in the PL literature
- Laurie Tratt: Parsing Composed Grammars with Language Boxes
- Eelco Visser: Linguistic abstractions for web programming? (WebDSL)
- Crista: Size & superlinear effects
- Tijs van der Storm: Enso?
- James Noble: An introduction to grounded research
Meetings
Venue:
Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark
(
map).
General contact: Erik Ernst, email <eernst(AT)cs.au.dk>.
Practical issues contact: Katrine Aakjær Nielsen, email <katnie(AT)cs.au.dk>, phone +45 6137 8823.
Practical issues booklet
A document containing a large amount of practical information for the meeting is available at
http://cs.au.dk/~eernst/wgld13/Practicalities_WGLD_Aarhus.pdf. (July 17: New version uploaded, with small corrections).
Accommodation
Hotel:
Scandic Plaza Aarhus, Banegårdspladsen 14, 8100 Aarhus C (
map); phone +45 8732 0100; email meeting.aarhus(AT)scandichotels.com. Please use booking code AAR210813 and make the reservation via phone +45 8732 0101 or email
plaza.aarhus@scandichotels.com (until
one month before the meeting). Note that online booking is not possible with the booking code. The hotel is right across the street from the rail road station, and there is a bus stop for both airport buses mentioned below at the station.
NB: The 'one month before the meeting' deadline expired Monday July 22nd. Negotiations about an extension of this booking has enabled us to hold a few extra rooms until
August 9th, using the same booking code / email address / telephone number.
Workshop fee
The workshop fee covers food coffee, lunch, dinner, and an outing.
Cost: The price is 2020 DKK (approx. $350). Please use our
webshop to make the payment, no later than Sunday
August 11th.
Sponsor: We are happy to announce that we have received financial support from the
Alexandra Institute, which will help keeping the price similar to the price for the previous meeting, in spite of the fact that we have a 25% VAT.. By the way, the director of the Alexandra Institute is Ole Lehrmann Madsen who is a programming language design veteran (the BETA programming language).
Getting there
Travel: For historical reasons (think: evil Copenhageners) there is no airport which is really close to Aarhus. There is
Aarhus Airport / AAR which is about 50km from the city (bus info on
their website). However,
Billund Airport / BLL is not much further away and has better connections. Finally, going via
Copenhagen Airport, CPH involves a 4 hour trip by train, but the train is rather convenient: it goes directly from the airport to the center of Aarhus (
train info). An extended version of this paragraph is available in the
practical issues booklet as well.
Tentative Schedule
| Wednesday | |
|---|
| 9:00-12:00 | introductions |
| 12:00-14:00 | lunch |
| 14:00-17:00 | talks |
| 19:00 | dinner |
| Thursday | |
|---|
| 9:00-10:00 | talks |
| 10:00-12:00 | Lars Bak and Googlers on Dart (details below) |
| 12:00-14:00 | lunch |
| 14:00-17:00 | talks |
| 19:00 | dinner |
| Friday | |
|---|
| 9:00-12:00 | talks |
| 12:00-14:00 | lunch |
| 15:00-17:30 | excursion: ARoS |
| 19:00-22:00 | dinner at Italia |
| Saturday | |
|---|
| 9:00-12:00 | talks |
| 12:00-14:00 | lunch |
| 14:00-17:00 | talks |
| 19:00 | dinner |
| Sunday | |
|---|
| 9:00-12:00 | talks |
| 12:00-14:00 | lunch |
Location of the meeting
The meeting room is Ada-333; detailed information about how to find it is given in the
practical issues booklet, page 6-7. Dinners and lunches also take place in the meeting room, except for the dinner Friday.
The excursion Friday goes to
ARoS? (surprisingly, finding the location using Google Maps and copy-pasting the URL does not work any more, but you can find it by pasting 'ARoS, Aros Allé 2, Aarhus, Denmark' into
maps.google.com).
After the excursion, there is dinner at Restaurant Italia (paste 'Restaurant Italia, Aaboulevarden 9, Aarhus C, Denmark' into
maps.google.com).
Lars Bak and Googlers on Dart
Lars Bak is managing Google's Aarhus office, and he and
Mads Sig Ager have accepted an invitation to visit our meeting for a session about Google's work on language design in the context of the Dart programming language (perhaps one more Googler will come, depending on some scheduling considerations). The plan is to have a presentation by Lars Bak followed by a highly interactive phase where the real-world constraints and academic ideas can blend and/or clash, hopefully inspiring both parties. Here is the abstract:
Introduction to panel discussion about the Dart programming language
Dart is a simple yet practical programming language designed to improve productivity for web programmers. While spending years implementing V8 and integrating it into Chrome, we experienced how programmers were struggling with large
JavaScript? applications. Lack of declarations, classes, static types, and libraries you could rely on clearly created problems. Dart is an attempt to solve these issues without introducing fragmentation to the web.
This panel discussion will focus on how simplicity, translation to JS, and performance goals impacted the design of Dart.
Mads Ager, Florian Loitsch, and Lars Bak, software engineers at Google.
Associated plans
In case you are making plans for events associated with this trip (e.g., if you are bringing your kids and want to visit Legoland in Billund) and you want to coordinate with other participants, you could use this space to set up the coordination.
James Noble will be accompanied by Katherine & Amy (12). We'll travel to Billund somehow on Sunday afternoon, go to Legoland on Monday 26th, fly out Monday 26 around 7pm...
fly out moday
Abstracts
Yannis Smaragdakis: Forsaking Inheritance: Supercharged Delegation in DelphJ?
We propose
DelphJ?: a Java-based OO language that eschews inheritance completely, in favor of a combination of class morphing and (deep) delegation. Compared to past delegation approaches, the novel aspect of our design is the ability to emulate the best aspects of inheritance while retaining maximum flexibility: using morphing, a class can select any of the methods of its delegatee and export them (if desired) or transform them (e.g., to add extra arguments or modify type signatures), yet without needing to name these methods explicitly and handle them one-by-one. Compared to past work on morphing, our approach adopts and adapts advanced delegation mechanisms, in order to add late binding capabilities and, thus, provide a full substitute of inheritance.
