Lambda the Ultimate

A set of two amazingly detailed US Navy films explaining the Basic Mechanics in Fire Control Computers is sure to interest many here. In addition to being amazingly cool and historically significant, analog computation is in some respects analogous to FRP (couldn't resist the pun). Compiling to analog components can be a fun project for enterprising hardware hackers/makers, methinks.

CALL FOR PAPERS

3rd International Conference on Software Language Engineering

SLE 2010
12-13 Oct 2010 -- Eindhoven, The Netherlands

http://planet-sl.org/sle2010/

Co-located with the International Conference on Generative
Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE'10).
------------------------------------------------------------
DATES

Jun 28: Abstract submission (required)
Jul 05: Paper submission (midnight Apia Samoa time)
Aug 27: Author notification
Sep 17: Paper submission for online proceedings
Oct 12-13: SLE 2010
Dec 03: Camera-ready copy submission for post-proceedings
------------------------------------------------------------
Software language engineering is devoted to topics related
to artificial languages in software engineering. The foremost
mission of the International Conference on Software Language
Engineering (SLE) is to encourage and organize communication
between communities that traditionally have looked at soft-
ware languages from different, more specialized, and yet
complementary perspectives. Thus, technologies, methods,
experiments and case studies from modelware, grammarware,
and ontologyware serving the objectives of software languages
are of particular relevance to SLE.

We invite high-quality submissions to all conference tracks.
Submissions must be PDF files following the Springer LNCS
style and will be managed using the EasyChair submission system.
Please check the conference web site for further information.

New at SLE 2010 is a Doctoral Symposium that will provide
a supportive yet questioning setting in which PhD students
can present their work, including goals, methods, and
preliminary results. The Symposium aims to provide students
with useful guidance and feedback on various aspects of their
research from established researchers and the other student
attendees.

Please forward this call to anyone who might be interested.

http://planet-sl.org/sle2010/
------------------------------------------------------------
PAPER SUBMISSION

Submitted papers must be original work and must not be
previously published in, currently submitted to, or currently
in consideration for any journal, book, conference, or
workshop. Each submitted paper will be reviewed closely by
at least three members of the program committee. Accepted
papers will be distributed at the conference via the online
proceedings as well as published in the post-proceedings,
which will appear in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer
Science (LNCS) series. Authors will have the opportunity
to revise their accepted paper(s) for the pre- and post-
proceedings. For an accepted paper to appear in the proceedings,
at least one author must attend the event and present the work.
------------------------------------------------------------
RESEARCH PAPERS

Research papers should report a substantial research contribution
to SLE and/or a successful application of SLE techniques. We
solicit high-quality contributions in the area of SLE ranging
from theoretical and conceptual contributions to tools, techniques,
and frameworks that support the aforementioned lifecycle activities.
We list examples of tools, techniques, applications, and problems of
interest to clarify the types of contributes that we seek:

* Formalisms used in designing and specifying languages and
tools that analyze such language descriptions
* Language implementation techniques
* Program and model transformation tools
* Composition, integration, and mapping tools for managing
different aspects of software languages or different
manifestations of a given language
* Transformations and transformation languages between
languages and models
* Language evolution
* Approaches to elicitation, specification, or verification
of requirements for software languages
* Language development frameworks, methodologies, techniques,
best practices, and tools for the broader language lifecycle
covering phases such as analysis, testing , and documentation.
* Design challenges in SLE
* Applications of languages including innovative domain-specific
languages or "little" languages

The preceding list is not exclusive or exhaustive. Visit
the conference web site for more information about the scope
and topics of interest of SLE, or contact the program co-chairs
with questions.

Page limit: 20
------------------------------------------------------------
SHORT PAPERS

Short paper may describe interesting or thought-provoking
concepts that are not yet fully developed or evaluated, make
an initial contribution to challenging research issues in SLE,
or discuss and analyze controversial issues in the field.

Page limit: 10
------------------------------------------------------------
TOOL DEMONSTRATION PAPERS

Because of SLE's ample interest in tools, we seek papers
that present software tools related to the field of SLE.
These papers will accompany a tool demonstration to be given
at the conference. The selection criteria include the
originality of the tool, its innovative aspects, the relevance
of the tool to SLE, and the maturity of the tool. Submissions
may also include an appendix (that will not be published)
containing additional screen-shots and discussion of
the proposed demonstration.

Page limit: 10
------------------------------------------------------------
MINI-TUTORIAL PAPERS

SLE is composed of various research areas, such as grammarware,
modelware, language schemas, and semantic technologies. The
cross product of attendees at SLE creates a situation where
the contribution from one session may be difficult to
understand by those not initiated to the area. To help unite
the various communities of SLE 2010, we solicit mini-tutorials
that provide discussion points for mapping common ideas between
related and complementary research topics of SLE.

A mini-tutorial submission should be between 15 and 20 pages.
------------------------------------------------------------
GENERAL CHAIR

Mark van den Brand
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
m.g.j.v.d.brand@tue.nl

PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS

Brian Malloy
Clemson University, USA
malloy@cs.clemson.edu

Steffen Staab
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
staab@uni-koblenz.de

DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM CHAIRS

Eric van Wyk
University of Minnesota, USA
evw@cs.umn.edu

Steffen Zschaler
Lancaster University, UK
szschaler@acm.org

ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE

Anthony Cleve (Publicity Co-Chair)
INRIA Lille, France

Nicholas Kraft (Publicity Co-Chair)
University of Alabama, USA

Arjan van der Meer (Web Chair)
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Alexander Serebrenik (Finance Chair)
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Uwe Assmann, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Colin Atkinson, University of Mannheim , Germany
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
John Boyland, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
Jordi Cabot, University of Toronto, Canada
Silvana Castano, University of Milan, Italy
Anthony Cleve, INRIA Lille, France
Michael Collard, University of Akron, USA
Charles Consel, LaBRI / INRIA, France
Stephen Edwards, Columbia University, USA
Gregor Engels, University of Paderborn, Germany
Aldo Gangemi, Semantic Technology Laboratory, Italy
Chiara Ghidini, FBK-irst, Italy
Jeff Gray, University of Alabama, USA
Peter Haase, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Gorel Hedin, Lund University, Sweden
Geert-Jan Houben, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Adrian Johnstone, University of London, UK
Nicholas Kraft, University of Alabama, USA
Ivan Kurtev, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Julia Lawall, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Marjan Mernik, University of Maribor, Slovenia
Pierre-Etienne Moreau, Ecole des Mines in Nancy, France
Peter Mosses, Swansea University, UK
Ralf Möller, Hamburg University of Technolog, Germany
Istvan Nagy, ASML, The Netherlands
Daniel Oberle, SAP Research, Germany
Richard Paige, University of York, UK
Jeff Z. Pan, University of Aberdeen, UK
Bijan Parsia, University of Manchester, UK
James Power, National University of Ireland, Ireland
Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Fernando Silva Parreiras, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Anthony Sloane, Macquarie University, Australia
Eleni Stroulia, University of Alberta, Canada
York Sure, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Gabriele Taentzer, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Jurgen Vinju, CWI, The Netherlands
Eelco Visser, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Steffen Zschaler, Lancaster University, UK

I would like to announce the OCaml Meeting 2010 in Paris. This meeting is about OCaml PL in general. This event will be followed by a full day of workshop in Paris.

The detailed announcement can be found here.

If this subject is off-topic, please forgive me and delete this topic.

Regards
Sylvain Le Gall

Has anyone created a language implementation where the constraint programming search strategies incorporate the algorithms in numerical computing such as hill climbing, genetic algorithms etc. ie. that you write in the constraint language, and the search can be run using the already available algorithm implementations in the scientific computing community.

Objective Modula-2 is apparently meant to let people do development for Apple devices without having to use the unsafer Objective C language. The creators explicitly wanted a language that was a little bit less advanced.

The reason why Modula-2 was chosen as a base language over other Pascal family languages is also very simple. Since the heavy lifting in the new language will be done using the Smalltalk derived object model and Cocoa or GNUstep, there is no need for any advanced features in the base language. Consequently, the ideal candidate for the base language would be a small language which lacks the features that will be added by the Smalltalk derived object system.

I have an opening for a few Erlang programmers/system architects to work on supply/demand aggregation technology. This is a cool application for FP. I am posting this to feel the waters a little and see if there is anyone out there who might be interested before I pursue other hiring channels.

We're looking at cloud hosting, distributed database technology, and a kind of algorithmic trading. I've been really happy applying the technology in this space and want to find some like-minded people who don't mind being paid well.

{e n e w h u i s <AT] g ~male [DOT> c o m}

In connection with an effort to reason about numerical programs we recently ran into what seems to be strange decisions in the design of the floating-point standard, IEEE 754. I discuss the issues in a blog post ("Reflexivity and other pillars of civilization"), showing in particular that the convention for equality regarding NaN (Not A Number) seem wrong; the reverse convention would be more in line with basic mathematical properties such as the reflexivity of equality.

We encountered the problem in connection with the work on revising the ISO standard for Eiffel, when we realized that transposing the IEEE 754 rule to the language would mean that we cannot put a value into an array and then assume that the value that we put is there! Neither can we assign a value v to a variable x and assume that afterward the value of x is equal to v.

See the detailed explanation at the page linked to above. I would be interested in the experience of people having run into similar issues.

Hi! This is my first post, and I am just a Ph.D. student, so please be twice patient in case my question is really dumb.

I was wondering if anyone ever tried mixing monads (especially state/continuation monads) and object encodings to achieve an "Objective Haskell". This way we could get mutable objects which behave very closely to Java/C# ones and with a relatively similar syntax thanks to syntactic sugar for monads.

http://eliminatingwork.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-prolog-is-by-far-best-most.html

Prompted by Z-bo's question of what is there to gripe about CSS, I thought I'd point out the Clutter toolkit:

Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, visually rich, portable and animated graphical user interfaces.

Clutter uses OpenGL (and optionally OpenGL|ES for use on Mobile and embedded platforms) for rendering but with an API which hides the underlying GL complexity from the developer. The Clutter API is intended to be easy to use, efficient and flexible.

Similar to Bling, it explores how GPU abstractions should be exposed to UI layout designers. I think there will be a lot of turmoil in this space over the next few years. Some related projects of interest are PixelBlender (with its integration into Flex 4) and similar projects in the Silverlight community. Another approach is to try to not change anything, as in a new GPU-accelerated Firefox branch. The only comparable approach I know of in the PL space is Conal Elliott's Vertigo, but that was not really about structured UI.

Edit: link fixed.

Edit 2: two big motivations here 1) performance on mobile devices and 2) enabling new types of UIs, such as physically realistic ones