[TYPES/announce] STOP'11 Call for Papers

[Tobias Wrigstad]

                        Call for Papers
               Script to Program Evolution (STOP)
                          at POPL 2011
                   Jan 29th, 2011, Austin, TX

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
optimizations.  With 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 behavior 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 practice,
and connect practice 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.


Important Dates
---------------
Submission: Nov 1st, 2010
Notification: Dec 15th, 2010
Final Version: Jan 15, 2011
Workshop: Jan 29, 2011


Programme Committee
-------------------
Amal Ahmed, Indiana
Robby Findler, Northwestern (chair)
Fritz Henglein, DIKU
Gavin Bierman, Microsoft
Gilad Bracha,  Cloud Programming Model
Jeff Foster, Maryland
Peter Thiemann, Freiburg
Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Northeastern


Organizers
----------
Jan Vitek, Purdue
Tobias Wrigstad, Uppsala

Steering Committee
------------------
Matthias Felleisen, Northeastern
Cormac Flanagan, UC Santa Cruz
Nate Nystrom, UTA
Jan Vitek, Purdue
Philip Wadler, Edinburg
Tobias Wrigstad, Uppsala


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
program 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.

Questions may be directed to Tobias Wrigstad (tobias.wrigstad@
it.uu.se) and Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu).