Emerging Languages Conference

This might be of interest to people that will be at OSCON 2010 or will be in Portland, Oregon on July 21-22.

Announcing the First Emerging Languages Conference

As new problems in computing arise, new languages are being created to help tackle those problems. We’re proud to announce an event that brings together programming language creators, implementors, researchers, and enthusiasts to share their creations, experiences, and challenges. Our goal for the event is nothing less than advancing the state of the art in programming language design and implementation.

Initial list of speakers include designers for Go, Io, Duby, Kodu, Newspeak, CoffeeScript, Ur, Objective-J, BitC and F#.

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Hmm...

Our goal for the event is nothing less than advancing the state of the art in programming language design and implementation.

One question: How?

My impression is that advancing the start of the art in programming language design and implementation, at least for hackers rather than researchers, is through low-level virtual machines like LLVM and VMKit. I would therefore think that an O'Reilly conference about PLDI-style issues would seek to bring together those two communities.

Not O'Reilly sponsored conference

It doesn't seem to be an O'Reilly sponsored conference. Why is the event co-located with OSCON?

One question: How?

This is as close to "How" as I could see on their page.

Want to talk to your peers about the latest in JIT compilation techniques, type systems, source-to-source translation, or syntactic theory? Just propose a session and get your geek on with like-minded language gurus.

Re: Hmm...

Hi, I'm one of the event's organizers.

We are indeed seeking to bring together language designers with VM authors. We've lined up Tav from the PyPy project, for exactly that reason. We'd love to see other VM folks there, and we're just as interested in the practicalities of creating new languages as the theoretical aspects of designing them.

Please do point any VM folks you know at our site. Thanks much!

I think any attempt to

My impression is that advancing the start of the art in programming language design and implementation, at least for hackers rather than researchers, is through low-level virtual machines like LLVM and VMKit
I think any attempt to quantify "advancing the state of the art" is self-limiting. LLVM and VMKit are branches on a larger tree. They are just one aspect of implementation, an aspect that many programmers are less interested in than the language itself.

I'm not sure I understand

Can you explain how implementation aspects of Parrot were divorced from Perl6 language specification?

At least here you can draw from real world examples you should be familiar with.

Otherwise, I fail to see what exactly you mean by self-limiting. The point behind being acquainted with tools like LLVM and VMKit, or knowing *Caml internals well enough, is to profit off decades of design knowledge and not reinvent the wheel. In doing so, you can spend months doing what used to take years. This makes labors of love more likely to produce something others can use, and not just watch the blood, sweat and tears drip.

Registration open

Registration is now open for the conference. Registration is free, but limited. The site states that only 120 people will be admitted, with approximately 40 of those spaces pre-reserved for speakers.

The timing of sessions and overall schedule has still not been published, so you may want to wait before buying your plane ticket. The list of speakers has been expanded since this was first posted. Currently the list is:

  • Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer â€“ Go
  • Steve Dekorte – Io
  • Charles Nutter – Duby
  • Matt MacLaurin – Kodu
  • Gilad Bracha – Newspeak
  • Jeremy Ashkenas – CoffeeScript
  • Adam Chlipala – Ur
  • Francisco Tolmasky – Objective-J
  • Jonathan Shapiro – BitC
  • Luke Hoban – F#
  • Tav – PyPy
  • Rich Hickey – Clojure
  • Christopher Bertels – Fancy
  • Jonathan Edwards – Coherence/Subtext
  • Alex Eagle – Noop
  • Slava Pestov – Factor
  • Erik Meijer – C#
  • Mark S Miller – E, Caja
  • Brian Rice – Slate
  • Walter Bright – D
  • Wolfgang De Meuter and Tom Van Cutsem – AmbientTalk
  • Phil Mercurio – Thyrd
  • Melvin Smith – Cola
  • Carson Gross – Gosu
  • Alexander Fritze – Stratified JavaScript
  • Alan Eliasen – Frink
  • Dan Bornstein – Dalvik
  • Steve Folta – Trylon