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