MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop

[larsen]

It seems to me this link hasn't been posted to the Monastery yet: The MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop

Organized by the Dynamic Languages Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab and cosponsored by Dr. Dobb's Journal , the primary purpose of the Lightweight Languages Workshop was to bring together programming language implementors from industry and programming language researchers from academia, put them all in the same room, and spark some lively discussion. Just to see how lively those discussions would be, Eugene Eric Kim attended the workshop and filed this report. Additionally, DDJ is webcasting portions of the workshop via our TechNetCast service at http://www.ddj.com/technetcast/

[davorg]

Sounds like our guys didn't come out of it too well :(

Interesting to compare it with Simon Cozens' own account.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

[jepri]

Sounds like our guys did fine, and the reporter had a bad day. He hands out criticisms to most of the attendees, suggesting that an academics favourite past time is sulking, etc. The only people who were let off were the scheme programmers.

The impression I got from Simon's account was that he paid ferocious attention to the other people there. From my own experiences with academia, I'd say that paying attention is one of the highest compliments you can pay.

In regard to the occasional gaffe in a speech, I always thought that it was important to pay attention to what people meant, rather than the manner in which they said it. Still, I suppose the writer wouldn't be a reporter if he couldn't find something bad to write about :)

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

[dave_aiello]

Over the weekend, the February 2002 hard copy edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal was delivered to my house. I had not heard about this conference until I read the article that larsen pointed to in his post. I was really glad to see that a small thread had already been started about the conference when I searched for it.

Although I suspect that many of the participants were more than a little biased against Perl and also against fully implemented programming languages that can thrive in the real world, I think that the Perl development community needs to understand and engage academics so that our work receives the respect that it deserves.

I sincerely wish that more attention is paid to issues like this (our relationship to other development and research communities) in discussions here on PerlMonks. It's just that I'm not exactly sure what to do in order to encourage and/or facilitate this.

FWIW, I was really impressed with the Simon Cozens' goodwill and patience in his explanation of the Lightweight Languages Workshop, particularly since it sounds like he and Dan Sugalski were besieged because some of the other attendees didn't appreciate Perl. We were very fortunate to have people like them representing us.

Dave Aiello
Chatham Township Data Corporation