ECOOP, Berlin

Potsdamer Platz
Originally uploaded by supercooldave

Last week I went to the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) in Berlin. I enjoyed the conference quite a lot, mainly because I got to meet up with old friends and colleagues and supervisors, but also because I met many new people and was quite inspired.

The week started with the IWACO workshop organized by Tobias Wrigstad, James Noble, Sophia Drossopoulou and myself. We had quite a turn out: 15 papers, plus an invited talk by Vijay Saraswat, and audience numbering about 30 people. This was the second time we'd organized this workshop. The last one was 4 years ago, though there was a related workshop 8 years ago. I wonder whether we should have them more frequently.

The talks were quite interesting, mostly exploring variations of existing type systems. Perhaps the most interesting talks described new tools for extracting ownership information from existing programs (either statically or dynamically) and using this information to annotate the programs. Ownership inference is certainly an open question, though this workshop presented solid progress in that direction. Issues such as immutability, uniqueness, and permission control were discussed as crucial elements of ownership types systems.

The field is quite young---it only 9 years since our original ownership types paper---and it seems that there is still quite a bit of competition between parties. Due to this, I feel, there was little discussion about unified research goals for the field. Perhaps it is too early for this. Maybe we still need to explore the design and problem spaces. (That said, in his keynote talk, Jonathan Aldrich did give an outline of his thoughts on ownership types and other issues. Ownership is a key ingredient in architectural assurance, that is, expressing a software system's architecture to the programmer and ensuring that the programmer preserves the architectural invariants.)

The rest of ECOOP was much more general, but mostly quite interesting. I started a few little projects with Johan Ostlund, Tobias Wrigstad and Einar Broch Johnsen, as well as with Klaus Ostermann, and had some discussions with Sophia Drossopoulou which might lead somewhere. I'll keep the topics of these discussions under my hat for the moment.

The other cool part of ECOOP was that I got to meet and hang out with some of the Scala people, specifically, Adriaan Moors, Philipp Haller, and Philippe Altherr. Scala is an extremely interesting language, and it was great to talk about it with some of the guys working in the trenches. Foolishly, though, I didn't find time to talk to the Big O. Maybe next time.

And, finally, Berlin is a great city. Very photogenic. A pity that my camera died during the trip.