Little languages (Score 2, Informative)

Some folks have asked me about the talk I gave at the workshop, that Simon described so kindly in his review on perl.com.

I wrote a paper about it. Although it's true I am a pointy-headed academic, I do occasionally hack a few lines of code, and I when I've solved a problem over in the research world whose solution would be useful to hackers, I try very hard to write papers that are readable by your generic hacker.

If you go here http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~shivers/citations.html you'll see a list of papers I've written. These are the ones that people in the perl/scripting/lightweight-languages community might find interesting:

1. A universal scripting framework
2. The SRE regular-expression notation
3. Atomic heap transactions and fine-grain interrupts
4. Automatic management of operating-system resources
5. Continuations and threads: Expressing machine concurrency directly in advanced languages
6. Supporting dynamic languages on the Java virtual machine
7. A Scheme shell
8. Scsh reference manual

#1 is the lightweight-languages paper on which my talk last week was based. By the way, the expect/chat & make replacements I mention in the future work section of that paper are basically done. I've three students at Georgia Tech who are wrapping up the implementation of a nice recompilation system called sake (pronounced "sah-kay," like the fish), which I like very much. A student who worked for me at MIT two years ago did an expect & chat replacement. (Lots of the scripts in my /etc directory are now written in scheme rather than sh, and I wanted something for my ppp subsystem.)

#2 has an opening flame about a problem in the open-source community I call "the 80% solution" problem. The regex notation it describes is now standard with scsh.

#4 & #6 will be of interest to VM designers.

#8 is, ahh, somewhat more well known for its non-technical content. But I'm on a new set of meds now, and doing a lot better, really.

-Olin