[TYPES/announce] Call for Participation: STOP'11

[Tobias Wrigstad]

		      Call for Participation
		    Scripts to Programs (STOP)
		    Jan 29th, 2011, Austin, TX
		   http://wrigstad.com/stop11/

Please come join us at STOP (a workshop at POPL). See below for an
introduction to the workshop and the program.

Workshop Program
----------------

Invited talk:
by John Field

Pluggable Type System with Optional Runtime Monitoring of Type Errors
by Jukka Lehtosalo and David J. Greaves

Gradual Information Flow Typing
by Tim Disney, Cormac Flanagan

Type Inference with Run-time Logs
by Ravi Chugh, Ranjit Jhala, Sorin Lerner

Position Paper: Dynamically Inferred Types for Dynamic Languages
by Jong-hoon (David) An, Avik Chaudhuri, Jeffrey S. Foster, and Michael Hicks

The Ciao Approach to the Dynamic vs. Static Language Dilemma
by Manuel Hermenegildo


Workshop Overview
-----------------
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.


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

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