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Of scripts and programs: tall tales, urban legends, and future prospects

Published:26 October 2009Publication History

ABSTRACT

Scripting languages are playing an increasing role in today's software landscape due to their support for rapid and exploratory development. They typically have lightweight syntax, weak data privacy, dynamic typing, powerful aggregate data types, and allow execution of the completed parts of incomplete programs. While many of their uses are web-centric, scripting languages also show up in non-traditional domains such as space exploration and administration of the pension benefits entire countries. Considering their importance to the practice of computing, it is surprising to see that, in academic circles, scripting is still often viewed as an undisciplined and unprincipled attempt at programming. In this talk, I will summarize work carried in collaboration with IBM Research on bridging the divide between scripting and programming. I will motivate our investigations with some success stories of scripting languages used in unusual places. Then I will dispel some misconceptions about the nature of scripts with preliminary results from a large corpus analysis of programs written in a popular scripting language. Finally, I will talk about the design of a new language, called Thorn, that aims to ease the journey from scripts to programs (and back).

References

  1. Bard Bloom, John Field, Nathaniel Nystrom, Johan Östlund, Gregor Richards, Rok Strnisa, Jan Vitek, and Tobias Wrigstad. Thorn - robust, concurrent, extensible scripting on the JVM. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), October 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Martin Hirzel, Nathaniel Nystrom, Bard Bloom, and Jan Vitek. Matchete: Paths through the pattern matching jungle. In 10th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL), pages 150--166. Springer, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Sylvain Lebresne, Gregor Richards, Johan Östlund, Tobias Wrigstad, and Jan Vitek. Understanding the dynamics of javascript. In International Workshop on Script to Program Evolution (STOP), July 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Tobias Wrigstad, Patrick Eugster, John Field, Nate Nystrom, and Jan Vitek. Software hardening: A research agenda. In International Workshop on Script to Program Evolution (STOP), July 2009. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

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  1. Of scripts and programs: tall tales, urban legends, and future prospects

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      DLS '09: Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Dynamic languages
      October 2009
      118 pages
      ISBN:9781605587691
      DOI:10.1145/1640134
      • Program Chair:
      • James Noble
      • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 44, Issue 12
        DLS '09
        December 2009
        107 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/1837513
        Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2009 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s)

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 26 October 2009

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      Acceptance Rates

      DLS '09 Paper Acceptance Rate10of27submissions,37%Overall Acceptance Rate32of77submissions,42%

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