Lambda the Ultimate

CRA-W/CDC and SIGPLAN Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, Philadelphia, PA (co-located with POPL 2012) Tuesday January 24, 2012

We are pleased to invite students interested in programming languages research to the first PL mentoring workshop. The goal of this workshop is to introduce senior undergraduate and early graduate students to research topics in programming language theory as well as provide career mentoring advice to help them get through graduate school, land a great job, and succeed. We have recruited leaders from the programming language community to provide overviews of current research topics, and have organized panels of speakers to give students valuable advice about how to thrive in graduate school, search for a job, and cultivate habits and skills that will help them in research careers.

This workshop is part of the activities surrounding POPL, the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, and takes place the day before the main conference. One goal of the workshop is to make the POPL conference more accessible to newcomers and we hope that participants will stay through the entire conference.

Through the generous donation of our sponsors, we are able to provide travel scholarships to fund student participation. These travel scholarships will cover reasonable travel expenses (airfare, hotel and registration fees) for attendance at both the workshop and the POPL conference. Anyone may apply for a travel scholarship, but first priority will be given to women and under-represented minority applicants.

The workshop registration is open to all. Students with alternative sources of funding for their travel and registration fees are welcome.

APPLICATION FOR TRAVEL SUPPORT:
The travel funding application can be accessed from the workshop web site. The deadline for full consideration of funding is December 2, 2011. Selected participants will be notified starting December 9th and will need to register for the workshop by December 24th.

ORGANIZERS:
Stephanie Weirich, Kathleen Fisher and Ron Garcia

SPONSORS:
The Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W), the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), and the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN).

We don't usually post conference or workshop announcements on the front page, but this seemed sufficiently new and worthy to me. Please note that the deadline for the application for travel support is only two days away!

From the paper:

In the proposed approach, abstraction-driven design, the core of the development approach is built around the rapid creation of reusable design decisions, referred to abstractions in accordance to the terminology used by the designers of the approach.
The approach is supported with tools integrated in Microsoft Visual Studio, and once the developers are familiar with the tools, the homogeneity of applications built with the approach is high. Furthermore, since one of the core parts of the tools include automatic code generation, even the abstractions themselves can be modified as the development progresses and more and more knowledge about the problem being solved accumulates to them.

The tools have been noted on the MSDN VisualStudio T4 blog.

Ok that probably doesn't sound all that exciting -- I think they have had trouble getting the idea of what is magically new and cool about it across to people (if you are on the Software Craftsmanship list you'll have seen that). But it sounds like a worthwhile advancement on from MDD of yore. (Note that I think the tools are intended to be more portable than just MSFT VS, but that's where they started.)