Scala 2016
Sun 30 - Mon 31 October 2016 Amsterdam, Netherlands
co-located with SPLASH 2016
Mon 31 Oct 2016 09:00 - 10:00 at Matterhorn 2 - Keynote 2

“Do well-typed programs go wrong?” "Of course they do, dear, even the finest Scala programs written using the best of type systems.” “But then, why bother?” “Because it is the way of the world child.” The vast majority of programs written today are written in languages with a single, unconstrained, type; in other words they ignore four decade of research in programming languages. But all is not lost. An idea –referred to, for the lack of better name, as gradual typing– has gained hold in both academe and industry. At heart, gradual typing is about incrementally decorating untyped programs with type annotations and obtaining (partial) correctness. Not surprisingly soundness has a very different meaning in academic efforts and industrial ones. This talk will attempt to explain what it means for a variable to have a type and argue that soundness must be revisited in this new age. Examples from our experience implementing and evaluating gradual type systems for languages such as JavaScript, Thorn and Racket will illustrate the talk. Some hopeful conclusions will be drawn.

Jan Vitek is a Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. Dr. Vitek was born in Czechoslovakia and educated in Switzerland. Over the years, he worked on topics related to programming languages, their design, use, and implementation. With Noble and Potter, he proposed the notion of flexible alias control which became know as Ownership Types. He led the Ovm project which produced the first real-time Java virtual machine to be flight tested on a ScanEagle drone (he claims no one was harmed). Outcomes of this project include the Schism real-time garbage collector and the FijiVM – a production VM for embedded systems. More recently, he worked on dynamic languages, trying to make sense of JavaScript and to design a new language called, Thorn. Nowadays, he spends his time with statisticians and data scientists. Jan believes that his 2012 election as Chair of SIGPLAN was an accident; since has been busy trying to rock the boat to ensure this does not happen again. In his spare time, Jan enjoys organizing conferences and sitting on PCs (over 25 in the last decade). He founded the MOS (mobile objects), IWACO (alias control), STOP (gradual typing), and TRANSACT (transactional memory) workshop series. He was the first program chair of VEE and chaired ESOP, ECOOP, Coordination and TOOLS. He was the general chair of PLDI (in Beijing!), ISMM and LCTES. He may still be sitting on the steering committees of ECOOP, JTRES, ICFP, OOPLSA, POPL, PLDI, LCTES, ESOP.

Mon 31 Oct

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

08:30 - 10:00
Keynote 2Scala at Matterhorn 2
08:30
30m
Day opening
Opening - Day 2
Scala
Sandro Stucki EPFL, Manohar Jonnalagedda EPFL, Switzerland
09:00
60m
Talk
This is not a Type: Gradual typing in practiceKeynote
Scala
Jan Vitek Northeastern University