[TYPES/announce] STOP 2009 [Deadline Extension]

[Tobias Wrigstad]

                    [N.B. Deadline extended to April 13th]

			       Call for Papers
		     Script to Program Evolution (STOP)
				at ECOOP 2009
			July 6th, 2009, Genova, Italy

Recent years have seen increased use of scripting languages in large
applications. Scripting languages optimize development time, especially early
in the software life cycle, over safety and robustness.

As the understanding of the system reaches a critical point and requirements
stabilize, scripting languages become less appealing.  Compromises made to
optimize development time make it harder to reason about program correctness,
harder to do semantic-preserving refactorings, and harder to optimize
execution speed. Lack of type information makes code harder to navigate and
to use correctly. In the worst cases, this situation leads to a costly and
potentially error-prone rewrite of a program in a compiled language, losing
the flexibility of scripting languages for future extension.

Recently, pluggable type systems and annotation systems have been proposed.
Such systems add compile-time checkable annotations without changing a
program's run-time semantics which facilitates early error checking and
program analysis.  It is believed that untyped scripts can be retrofitted to
work with such systems.  Furthermore, integration of typed and untyped code,
for example, through use of gradual typing, allows scripts to evolve into
safer programs more suitable for program analysis and compile-time
optimisations.  With very few exceptions, practical reports are yet to be
found.

The STOP workshop focuses on the evolution of scripts, largely untyped code,
into safer programs, with more rigid structure and more constrained behaviour
through the use of gradual/hybrid/ pluggable typing, optional contract
checking, extensible languages, refactoring tools, and the like. The goal is
to further the understanding and use of such systems in practise, and connect
practise and theory.

To this end, we encourage not only submissions presenting original research
results, but also papers that attempt to establish links between different
approaches and/or papers that include survey material, experience reports and
tool demonstrations. Original research results should be clearly described,
and their usefulness to practitioners outlined. Paper selection will be based
on the quality of the submitted material, including surveys. Demos will
judged on the perceived relevance for the intended audience.

The accepted papers will be made available through ACM's digital library. 


Important Dates
===============
Submission: April 13, 2009 (23.59 Apia, Samoa)
Notification: May 8, 2009  
Final Version: June 8, 2009
Workshop: July 6, 2009


Programme Committee
===================
Cormac Flanagan, University of California Santa Cruz
Jan Vitek, Purdue University
Jeff Foster, University of Maryland
Jeremy Siek, University of Colorado
Kostis Sagonas, Uppsala University
Nate Nystrom, IBM T.J. Watson Research
Peter Thiemann, Universitat Freiburg
Philip Wadler, University of Edinburgh
Tobias Wrigstad, Purdue University (Chair)
Todd Millstein, UCLA


Organizers
==========
Nate Nystrom, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Jan Vitek, Purdue University
Tobias Wrigstad, Purdue University


Selection Process
=================
Both full papers (up to 12 pages LNCS) and position papers (1-2 pages LNCS)
are welcome. All submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee.
The accepted papers, after rework by the authors, will be published in the
Workshop Proceedings, which will be distributed at the workshop. All accepted
submissions shall remain available from the workshop web page.

Papers should be submitted through EasyChair by April 13, 2009.
(https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=stop09) Questions may be
directed to Tobias Wrigstad (wrigstad AT cs DOT purdue DOT edu).