PLI 2002 -- report from someone who was there?

[Francesco Cesarini]

Of all the EUCs I've been to,  the quality of the presentations at PLI 
surpassed them all.  A big thank you to all who presented and to every 
one else who made it happen.

The papers should be stored in ACM's digital library at 
http://www.acm.org/dl/  Some papers are available here and there in 
various user's accounts and  I will soon be putting what is available on 
http://dmoz.org, but don't hold your breath...

Oh, and Ulf forgot to mention that we had plenty of good food and beer, 
and there in-between got a few culture points by visiting the odd art 
museum.

Cheers,
Francesco
--
http://www.erlang-consulting.com


Ulf Wiger wrote:

>On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Matthias Lang wrote:
>
>>There are a bunch potentially interesting papers there. I
>>can't find an online copy of the proceedings anywhere.
>>Anyone know? Anyone who was there care to comment on how
>>big the workshop was (how many people)?
>>
>
>The proceedings will hopefully appear sometime through ACM.
>At least that's the general idea.
>
>The workshop was quite good, even though the turnout was not
>exactly enormous (about 30 people, I think). I heard a
>rumour that some other workshops had bigger problems.
>
>I did peek into another lecture hall where lots of people
>sat listening to someone pontificating about software reuse.
>Oh well. Software reuse was covered summarily in our
>workshop by (I think) Martin Logan who stated that there's
>lots of it in Erlang/OTP. (-:
>
>Short summary:
>
>- Phil Wadler explained to us that God gave us static
>  typing, but apparently not Erlang. However, God wants
>  us to use functional languages, so we're probably sort of
>  OK anyway. Phil also expressed great pride in being
>  invited speaker at an Erlang workshop, since Erlang is
>  _the_ most successful functional language in the world,
>  and the one with the most millionaires (no one cared to
>  explain Swedish tax laws to Phil -- God didn't give them
>  to us, anyway.) Lots of theory, and lots of T-shirts
>  coming off... well, you just had to be there.
>
>- Richard Carlsson talked about the new package concept.
>  It's coming together, but I've come up with some more
>  issues, to which I will return later. Nice talk.
>
>- Kostis explained about how Hipe may double the speed
>  of Bit Syntax matching. Promising.
>
>- Thomas Arts gave a high-speed practical demo of his
>  trace analysis program. Great stuff, I think, for
>  those who want to visualize their Erlang programs
>  in different ways.
>
>- I talked about testing with Erlang, and to my surprise,
>  the auditorium didn't fall asleep. Must mean that people
>  are actually using Erlang for some real stuff.  (:
>
>- Scott Fritchie talked about the Erlang Driver Writer's
>  Toolkit. This is really good stuff. Kenneth Lundin may
>  have to stop telling people that it's unsafe to use
>  linked-in drivers...
>
>- Hal Snyder and Martin Logan talked about Erlang use at
>  Vail Systems. Same old story about how a small group
>  of people are allowed to use Erlang to monitor and
>  restart all those Java apps that can't stay up by
>  themselves -- but have to fight to be allowed to tackle
>  the really interesting stuff. Just kidding. Good
>  presentation, down-to-earth, factual, success story.
>
>- Thomas Arts again, describing how they analysed some
>  properties about a Video on Demand system, using
>  verification techniques on actual Erlang code to
>  determine dimensioning properties like number and
>  size of disks, distribution of movies across disks,
>  bandwith, etc. State of the art stuff, indeed.
>
>- Kostis offered some ideas on how to speed up
>  inter-process communication in Erlang. The paper
>  states the goal as being "to have truly lightweight
>  processes where message passing is at least as
>  efficient as method invocation in a modern object
>  oriented language". Some interesting ideas, but
>  nothing firm yet. Hope they succeed.
>
>- Joe Armstrong talked about how his protocol description
>  and contract definition syntax does everything XML
>  and WSDL does, and more, but much more beautifully.
>  Always fun to listen to Joe, and I've already started
>  playing with his new toy. Very interesting.
>  http://www.sics.se/~joe/ubf/site/home.html
>
>- Closing comments, and a preliminary report on the
>  questionnaire. Everyone seemed happy.
>
>/Uffe
>