Proceedings of the 2007 international conference on Dynamic languages: in conjunction with the 15th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 2007

Abstract

Although Smalltalk is one of the oldest object-oriented programming languages, its conception and programming environment can still be considered as a design pearl and as a beacon in the realm of programming languages and programming environments. Other dynamic languages (such as Lisp, Scheme, Self,...) were similarly influential in expanding what software engineers can express with their programs.With the rising popularity of languages like Ruby, Python, Javascript, PHP, and with the growing challenges of aspect-orientation, pervasive computing, mobile code, and context-aware computing, dynamic languages are a worthy topic for further research. Therefore, ESUG decided to broaden the scope of the formerly "Smalltalk only" research track of its yearly meeting in order to enable cross-fertilization with research conducted using other dynamic languages. This way we hope to obtain more significant scientific results on various aspects of dynamicity in programming languages. This volume holds the papers that were presented during the 2007 edition of the conference which was held in Lugano, Switzerland. After careful reviewing by at least three reviewers we selected 11 papers out of 16 for inclusion in the conference. We took great care to avoid conflicts of interest by ensuring that reviewers did not have any formal connections to one of the authors of the papers they reviewed, namely (a) working in the same institution, university, or research group, (b) having written joint papers, (c) supervised earlier work, (d) had family ties, (e) or otherwise felt uncomfortable reviewing the work. The papers were reviewed using the typical academic standards: (a) present sound scientific work (a relevant problem, a convincing solution described in sufficient detail to allow replication, a sound validation, cite related work), (b) help the community (have something interesting to say to researchers working on dynamic programming languages in general and Smalltalk in particular), (c) reports something worthwhile for further reference (other researchers will cite this work in the future).