Dynamic Languages Symposium

The second Dynamic Languages Symposium at OOPSLA 2006 was a great success. There were 193 registered participants. To put this into context, it's a little more than 15% of the overall OOPSLA audience, and is significantly larger than most other events that are part of OOPSLA.

DLS 2006 had three invited talks:

  • Ian Piumarta: Openness and simplicity in dynamic systems implementation
  • Audrey Tang: Perl 6
  • Avi Bryant: Data Refactoring for Amateurs

You can download the presentations and try to guess if Audrey really delivered 433 slides in an hour!

Six research papers were presented:

  • PyPy's Approach to Virtual Machine Construction
    Armin Rigo and Samuele Pedroni
  • Runtime Synthesis of High-Performance Code from Scripting Languages
    Christopher Mueller and Andrew Lumsdaine
  • Interlanguage Migration: From Scripts to Programs
    Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Matthias Felleisen
  • Hop, a Language for Programming the Web 2.0
    Manuel Serrano, Erick Gallesio, and Florian Loitsch
  • Ambient References: Addressing Objects in Mobile Networks
    Tom Van Cutsem, Jessie Dedecker, Stijn Mostinckx, Elisa Gonzalez Boix, Theo D'Hondt, and Wolfgang De Meuter
  • Hardware Transactional Memory Support for Lightweight Dynamic Language Evolution
    Nicholas Riley and Craig Zilles

The full papers are published in the OOPSLA companion and available in the ACM digital library.

DLS facilitated lively discussion between the talks, during the question and answer sessions.
Of the feedback we received (which unfortunately was not a large sample), 75% rated the day "excellent" and 25% rated it "ok". Nobody gave it a negative rating. This makes DLS one of the most highly rated events at OOPSLA this year. Thanks to everyone for participating.

Preparations are under way for DLS 2007, to be held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, October 22, 2007. The co-chairs are Pascal Costanza and Robert Hirschfeld. We look forward to seeing you again at OOPSLA/DLS next year.