Administrivia

James Noble

Ever Onward!

EVER ONWARD — EVER ONWARD!
That’s the spirit that has brought us fame!
We’re big, but bigger we will be
We can’t fail for all can see
That to serve humanity has been our aim!
Our products now are known, in every zone,
Our reputation sparkles like a gem!
We’ve fought our way through — and new
Fields we’re sure to conquer too
For the EVER ONWARD I.B.M.

Keeping up the blog has not been one of our strong points, but we have been making some progress in the last few months. We’ve been working our way through a review of Grace’s design and specification, with a few nontrivial changes:

  • Classes create methods, rather than objects, so no longer have “dots” in their name
  • Calling methods in superclasses relies on aliasing, not “super requests”
  • Traits support stateless reusable components
  • A simpler inheritance model that supports classes inheriting from multiple traits
  • Replacing variadic methods with primitive sequences

We expect to describe these changes in a few blog posts soon, as we are working through a thoroughly revised specification.  We plan to release the specification and implementations around the end of February,  for feedback from the community. We then plan to hold workshops (as we did in 2011) to go over what we hope will get getting close to a 1.0 version of the language design. So: Onward! Ever Onward!

James Noble

Grace events at SPLASH

We’re now planning the next Grace workshop(s) in Portland Oregon in conjunction with the SPLASH conference. Based on the successful ECOOP workshops, at this stage we’re thinking of holding:

  • a BOF on Monday Oct 24 in the evening — after the Educators’ Symposium, the Dynamic Languages’ Symposium, PLOP, and the workshops (including Plateau & FOOL) which are on Sunday and Monday. All three of us will be there for a general report-back on the project to date.
  • a Design Workshop on Friday Oct 28th (the day after the conference) working over open questions in the design in detail (probably the module & type systems). This will be held at Portland State University, an easy tram ride from the conference venue & hotels. We expect some people would stay only for the morning, others till mid-afternoon.

We’d love to see as many of you as possible at the BOF and at design
workshop. If you’re able to come, please let us know by emailing
James, kjx@ecs.vuw.ac.nz, so we have some idea who’s coming.

Alternatively, if there is are reasons why the proposed dates don’t
work — but other dates might — again let us know!

Andrew & James will be around for all SPLASH, so we’ll also be able to catch up then. We’ll probably arrange to go out for dinner on the Thursday evening after the conference (before the Friday workshop), and we can probably organise another BOF during the conference if many people can attend neither Monday nor Friday.

We look forward to catching up with everyone at SPLASH/OOPSLA this year, and hope may of you will be able to come to the BOF and the workshop.

cheers

Andrew & Kim & James

James Noble

Grace Workshop San Jose, Sat 4 June

Here are the details for the Grace Workshop on Saturday 4 June:

Four Points by Sheraton San Jose
211 S First Street
San Jose, CA 95113
United States of America
Phone: 1 (408) 282-8800

We’ll aim to start around 10am.

If you feel that you will be able to come, and have not yet emailed Andrew or James your name, please do so when you get a chance.

James Noble

Principles of Language Design

Late last year, Sophia Drossopoulou and Éric Tanter asked us about the principles behind the design of Grace. About the values, principles, and practices, in fact, with reference to Dave Ungar’s great Dahl-Nygaard ECOOP Keynote.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to do a good job of describing Grace’s principles retrospectively, in around 2025 (doing as good a job as Dave will be much harder of course). To be fair, we have made a start, in that the Grace Manifesto and SPLASH sides contain a potpourri of principles — perhaps values and practices too — that we seek to follow in the design of Grace.

So as well as posting notes on language design, in 2011, we plan to post notes on the principles underlying our design of Grace – unpacking the principles in the manifesto and panel slides (they’re not quite the same, it turns out) and no doubt introducing some new principles we discovered along the way.

For now, I’ll start by mentioning one principle that doesn’t get an explicit notice in either the manifesto or the panel slides: openness. We genuinely hope that the design of Grace can be as open as possible: while there is a core group of “committers” to the specification, as yet, nothing’s fixed or final: and we have already made or confirmed significant decisions about Grace based on the feedback from supporters and the blog. We hope to continue as openly and as transparently as we can — that’s what this blog is about — and we hope to augment this with some Grace workshops around the world in 2011.

Wishing you all a happy and graceful New Year