Third Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications

Following last two years’ workshop on dynamic languages at the ECOOP conference, the Dyla 2007 workshop was a successful and popular event. As its name implies, the workshop’s focus was on dynamic languages and their applications. Topics and discussions at the workshop included macro expansion mechanisms, extension of the method lookup algorithm, language interpretation, reflexivity and languages for mobile ad hoc networks. The main goal of this workshop was to bring together different dynamic language communities and favouring cross communities interaction. Dyla 2007 was organised as a full day meeting, partly devoted to presentation of submitted position papers and partly devoted to tool demonstration. All accepted papers can be downloaded from the workshop’s web site. In this report, we provide an overview of the presentations and a summary of discussions. 1 Workshop Description and Objective The advent of Java and C# has been a major breakthrough in the adoption of some important object-oriented language characteristics. It turned academic features like interfaces, garbage-collection and meta-programming into technologies generally accepted by industry. But the massive adoption of these languages now also gives rise to a growing awareness of their limitations. On the one hand, researchers and practitioners feel themselves wrestling with the static type systems, the overly complex abstract grammars, the simplistic concurrency provisions, the very limited reflection capabilities and the absence of higher-order language constructs such as delegation, closures and continuations. On the other hand, dynamic languages like Ruby and Python are getting ever more popular. Therefore, it is time for academia to move on and to help pushing such languages into the mainstream. On the one hand, this requires us to look back and pick up what is out there in existing dynamic languages (such as Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Self,...) to be recovered for the future. On the other hand, it requires