ECOOP / Workshop 15

Object-oriented language engineering for the post-Java era

Abstract

The advent of Java has always been perceived as a major breakthrough in the realm of object-oriented languages. And to some extent it was: it turned academic features like interfaces, garbage-collection and meta-programming into technologies generally accepted by industry. Nevertheless Java also acted as a brake especially to academic language design research. Whereas pre-Java Ecoop's and Oopsla's traditionally featured several tracks with a plethora of research results in language design, more recent versions of these conferences show far less of these. And those results that do make it to the proceedings very often are formulated as extensions of Java. Therefore they necessarily follow the Java-doctrine: statically typed single-inheritance class-based languages with interfaces and exception handling.

"On the grapevine" we know that people are still interested in language design that radically diverges from this doctrine. Their papers somehow don't seem to make it because of several reasons. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in object-oriented language design who adhere language features and languages that do not fit into the mainstream.

Main Topics

• agent languages
• distributed languages
• actors, active objects
• mixins
• prototypes
• multi-paradigm
• reflection and meta-programming
•  ... and all other exotic features which you would categorize as OO.

The plan is to structure the workshop as follows:

• Before the lunch break, a selected number of authors will be invited so present their position paper. The selection will be based on the originality and visionariness of the work or of the defended position (see below).
• After lunch, we will split up in groups - depending on the number of participants and depending on their interests - in order to have discussion.
• A final plenary session will be organized to reflect on the discussion held by the groups.

Paper Submission

Submission and email correspondence to Wolfgang De Meuter

Type of Papers	position / vision / experience
Formatting Size	Potential attendants are expected to submit either a long (max 10 page) paper presenting scientific results about OO language design (a language, a feature, ...) or a short (max 5 page) essay defending a position about whereto object-oriented language design should be heading. Abstracts can be submitted in ASCII or PDF.
Deadlines	Position paper due April 21th Notification of acceptance May 19th

Details

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