[TYPES/announce] Call for Papers: Workshop on Script to Program Evolution (STOP 2012)

[Sam Tobin-Hochstadt]

CALL FOR PAPERS

3rd Workshop on Script to Program Evolution
   (co-located with ECOOP and PLDI)
   Beijing, China
   June 11, 2012
   http://wrigstad.com/stop12/

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.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Abstracts, position papers, and status reports are welcome. Papers
should be 1-2 pages in standard ACM SIGPLAN format. All submissions
will be reviewed by the program committee. The accepted papers, after
rework by the authors, will be published in an informal proceedings,
which will be distributed at the workshop. All accepted submissions
shall remain available from the workshop web page.

Papers are to be submitted electronically via the STOP website:
   http://wrigstad.com/stop12/


IMPORTANT DATES

paper submission:          11:59 PM 30 March 2012 Eastern Daylight Time
notification:              20 April 2012
camera-ready paper:        15 May 2012
conference date:           11 June 2012

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

    Avik Chaudhuri, Adobe Labs
    Kathryn Gray, Swansea University
    Arjun Guha, Brown University
    David Herman, Mozilla Research
    Manuel Hermenegildo, IMDEA
    Atsushi Igarashi, Kyoto University
    Ranjit Jhala, University of California, San Diego
    Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (Chair), Northeastern University