Talking Meta

Meta talk about Smalltalk, Seaside, Magritte, Pier and related things.

PhD Defense Video & Slides

For those that missed my PhD defense, below the video recording of the event. Thanks go to Tudor Gîrba and Jorge Ressia for recording it. The slides can be found on SlideShare.

Posted by Lukas Renggli at 22 October 2010, 7:34 am with tags phd, helvetia, pharo, smalltalk comment link

PhD Defense on Dynamic Language Embedding

I would like to invite to my PhD defense:

Dynamic Language Embedding With Homogeneous Tool Support

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are increasingly used as embedded languages within general-purpose host languages. DSLs provide a compact, dedicated syntax for specifying parts of an application related to specialized domains. Unfortunately, such language extensions typically do not integrate well with existing development tools. Editors, compilers and debuggers are either unaware of the extensions, or must be adapted at a non-trivial cost. Furthermore, these embedded languages typically conflict with the grammar of the host language and make it difficult to write hybrid code; few mechanisms exist to control the scope and usage of multiple tightly interconnected embedded languages.

In this dissertation we present Helvetia, a novel approach to embed languages into an existing host language by leveraging the underlying representation of the host language used by these tools. We introduce Language Boxes, an approach that offers a simple, modular mechanism to encapsulate (i) compositional changes to the host language, (ii) transformations to address various concerns such as compilation and syntax highlighting, and (iii) scoping rules to control visibility of fine-grained language changes. We describe the design and implementation of Helvetia and Language Boxes, discuss the required infrastructure of a host language enabling language embedding, and validate our approach by case studies that demonstrate different ways to extend or adapt the host language syntax and semantics.

The defense will take place on Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 16h15 in Room 001, Engehaldenstrasse 8, Bern. For directions please see http://www.iam.unibe.ch/en/contact.

After the defense, there will be an apéro.

Posted by Lukas Renggli at 17 October 2010, 5:31 pm with tags phd, helvetia, pharo, smalltalk 5 comments link

Preparing for ESUG 2009

I am currently preparing for the International Smalltalk Conference (ESUG) in Brest, France.

helvetia.png On Monday, I will present the paper of Tudor Gîrba and myself titled Why Smalltalk Wins the Host Languages Shutout at the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies. The paper argues why Smalltalk is an excellent choice for language engineering as it is done for example in Helvetia.

Then at the Innovation Technology Awards I will support Tudor Gîrba presenting Glamour, a framework to script browser. Don’t miss to vote for us.

glamour.png On Tuesday, Julian Fitzell and I will give a quick Seaside Status Update just before lunch. Afterwards we give a 3 hour tutorial on advanced Seaside topics. The tutorial will introduce participants to some lesser-known areas of and highlight some of the new features in Seaside 2.9.

Last but not least I am looking forward to the Seaside Sprint that follows right after ESUG on Friday and Saturday.

I will try to keep posting on Twitter.

Posted by Lukas Renggli at 26 August 2009, 8:51 pm with tags esug, glamour, helvetia, seaside, smalltalk 1 comment link