Lambda the Ultimate

Are you interested in presenting a 45-minute talk on some Domain Specific Language (DSL) related topic? It doesn't matter which platform or OS you're targeting. It also doesn't matter whether you're an author, a vendor, a professional speaker or a developer in the trenches (in fact, I tend to be biased toward the latter). We're after interesting and unique applications of DSL technology and if you're doing good work in that area, then I need you to send me a session topic and 2-4 sentence abstract along with a little bit about yourself.

I'll be taking submissions 'til February 9th, 2009, but don't delay. Passion and a burning story to tell count twice as much as anything else.

And don't be shy about spreading this announcement around! I've got good coverage in the .NET and Windows communities, but don't know very many folks in the Java or Unix or hardcore modeling worlds, so if you're in that world, let those guys know! Thanks.

The DSL DevCon itself will be in Redmond, WA on the Microsoft campus April 16-17, 2009, right after the Lang.NET conference. Lang.NET will be focused on general-purpose languages, whereas the DSL DevCon will focus on domain-specific languages. The idea is that if you want to attend one or the other or both, that's totally fine. We'll have 2.5 days of Lang.NET on April 14-16 and then 1.5 days of DSL DevCon content. Oh, and the cost for both conferences is the same: $0.

We're only accepting 150 attendees to either conference. Every one of the five previous DevCons have sold out, so when we open registration, you'll want to be quick about getting your name on the list. Submit your DSL-related talk idea!

Ziggurat is a framework for writing extensible programming languages, and for defining static semantics for those languages. In other words, it is a language designer's toolkit.

Ziggurat is based on macros. When building a language using Ziggurat, it is easy to make that language extensible by adding a macro system. Ziggurat macros allow for incremental extension of the language by rewriting. What makes Ziggurat different from other macro systems is that Ziggurat allows the language extender to optionally define static semantics for her new language, and connect these static semantics amongst language levels. This makes it possible to write specialized analysis algorithms for the higher-level languages, either for optimization purposes, profiling purposes, debugging purposes, or whatever task analysis is put to.

Strangely enough this project from Olin Shivers and David Fisher was not mentioned here before.

Those with access may want to check out the paper on Ziggurat in the September 2008 double issue of JFP.