IRILL - Research and Innovation on Free Software In their everyday work, developers enjoy several features of scripting languages but fight against some of their weaknesses. In some cases these weaknesses can be addressed by ad-hoc tools, more advanced
implementation techniques, or language design constructions.
Recent research made impressive progress in improving and hardening scripting languages [ * ]. However, to improve the synergy between developers in scripting languages (Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Scilab...) and language implementation and analysis, we need to build a list of significative programming patterns that are encountered by programmers in their daily work and that are painful to deal with.
IRILL, whose goal is to bring together researchers and developer communities, is organising an informal meeting dedicated to these issues in its headquarters Paris on June 1st, 2011.
So, if your preferred scripting language gives you headhaches, and if you have noted down a few interesting programming patterns that you believe should be faster, more reliable, or in any way better handled by the current interpreters, please attend the meeting and give an informal short presentation (say about 10 minutes) illustrating the issue.
**The meeting has been postponed to a later date.
**
Contacts:
Roberto Di Cosmo <roberto@dicosmo.org>
Francesco Zappa Nardelli <Francesco.Zappa_Nardelli@inria.fr>
Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre@irill.org>
[ * ] Some interesting research articles that show how the life of scripting languages users can be improved:
- Abstract interpretation in a JavaScript Jit to increase efficiency of float operations
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/115734/aitypes.pdf
- Type analysis can catch annoying errors on Ruby on Rails programs
http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/PL/druby/papers/drails-ase09.pdf
- Race conditions can be statically detected in Erlang
http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe/dialyzer/publications/races.pdf