ECOOP day 2

Today's invited talk was by Dave Ungar and it felt more like a self-help tutorial than an academic talk. In fact all three of the talks I attended had a whiff of esteem boosting and soul searching about them: are we academics really that insecure in our endeavours or about out role in computer science?

Anyway, Dave still seemed pretty bitter about the lack of success of Self and the way it was handled at Sun, which might well be justified, but didn't fit into the therapeutic tone of the rest of the talk. The points I took from the talk were: interpreters are better than compilers (and this needs technologies such as JIT to realise), design languages on principles rather than examples, and simplicity is better than expressiveness.

The first technical talk of the day was Adding State and Visibility Control to Traits Using Lexical Nesting. The authors seem to back off the founding principles of traits by adding stateful traits (which are now exactly like classes or maybe mixins?) and nesting of objects to give visibility control. Composition is achieved by delegation and delegate methods are automatically generated. Of course, with state you then get back all the old multiple inheritance problems, which are addressed to some extent. So although nice ideas and well-thought out it seems to go completely against Dave Ungar's maxims of simplicity before expressivity and principles before examples.

I liked Modular Visitor Components:..., although I'm not sure if it's even close to practical. This is a possible solution to an extension of the expression problem - the expression families problem. I wasn't quite clear what this was or to what extent previous solutions address it, in particular where virtual classes fall down. The solution was implemented in Scala using a collection of quite terrifying PL technologies - higher order type parameters, variance, traits, and self types. The result is a suitably complex type system that is nicely expressive.

The other joint-best paper of the conference was Debugging Method Names. They find bugs in names such as getString not returning a value or not returning something of type String or setting something etc. They do all this automatically by analysing a whole bunch of programs, which is certainly clever but didn't really seem like a programming languages problem, or even that hard from the talk, maybe the paper better identifies the problems.