DYLA 2014 - Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications

The advent of Java and C# has been a major breakthrough in the adoption of some important object-oriented language characteristics. This breakthrough turned academic features like interfaces, garbage collection, and meta-programming into technologies generally accepted by industry. Nevertheless, the massive adoption of these languages now also gives rise to a growing awareness of their limitations. A number of reactions from industry testify this: invokedynamic bytecode instruction has been included in latest Java virtual machine release; the dynamic language runtime (DLR) is gaining popularity; C# adopted dynamic as a valid static type. Gartner prognoses further growth of dynamic languages.
Researchers and practitioners struggle with static type systems, overly complex abstract grammars, simplistic concurrency mechanisms, limited reflection capabilities, and the absence of higher-order language constructs such as delegation, closures and continuations. Dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, JavaScript and Lua are a step forward a solution to these problems and are getting more and more popular. Pushing these languages to mainstream requires practitioners to look back and pick up what is out there in existing dynamic languages such as Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk and Self. Practitioners also need to further explore the power of future dynamic language constructs in the context of new challenging fields such as pervasive computing.
The goal of this workshop is to act as a forum where practitioners can discuss new advances in the design, implementation and application of dynamically typed languages that, sometimes radically, diverge from the statically typed class-based mainstream. Another objective of the workshop is to discuss new as well as older "forgotten" languages and features in this context. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
programming language extensions
programming environment extensions
executing environments
static and dynamic analyses
optional type-checking
meta-object protocols
reverse engineering
domain-specific languages/tooling
testing environments
live programming
2 Targeted audience
The expected audience of this workshop is practitioners and researchers sharing the same interest in dynamically typed languages. Lua, Python, Ruby, Scheme and Smalltalk are gaining a significant popularity both in industry and academia. Nevertheless, each community has the tendency to only look at what it produces. Broadening the scope of each community is the goal of the workshop. To achieve this goal we will form a PC with leading persons from all languages mentioned above, fostering participation from all targeted communities.
3 Workshop Format and Submission Information
The workshop will have a demo-oriented style. The idea is to allow participants to demonstrate new and interesting features and discuss what they feel is relevant for the dynamic-language community. To participate to the workshop, you can either
submit (before March 15th 2014) an article (ACM Tighter Alternate style) describing your presentation and/or tool. Articles whose length ranges from 2 to 15 pages will be carefully reviewed by a program committee including but not limited to the organizers. Each accepted paper will be presented during the workshop and be published to the ACM Digital Library (at the option of each author) and the workshop's web site. The submission website is http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dyla14.
or give a 10-minute lightning demo of your work. A dedicated session will be allocated for this, provided there is ample time available.
A session on pair programming is also planned. People will then get a chance to share their technologies by interacting with other participants.