Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday 2010-02-22 Adam Chlipala on A Sane Approach to Modern Web Application Development

http://fare.livejournal.com/154579.html

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, February 22nd 2010 at 1800 at Harvard Pierce 209. Adam Chlipala will speak about A Sane Approach to Modern Web Application Development.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. Alex Plotnick will discuss a potential error in how Common Lisp formalized backquote. François-René Rideau will present Interface-Passing Style as a way to achieve parametric polymorphism and more.

Note that lacking a sponsor, buffet will no longer be offered after our meetings.

1 Adam Chlipala on A Sane Approach to Modern Web Application Development

Most web applications today are programmed with tools that feel in this domain as assembly language feels in many traditional domains; everything is a string, or at best a globally-accessible (and mutable!) document tree. Some recent language designs improve the situation, including explicit handling of key entities like page generators and database tables, with language-level detection of violations of the proper protocols for using these entities. I claim we should go even further and provide opportunities for encapsulation of web application components. Just as we are used to building encapsulated data structure implementations, we should be able to encapsulate entire ``sub-webs´´ of applications, possibly parametrized by additional data and code, and with the ability to ``own´´ and enforce access control on cookies, subtrees of a web page's structure, etc. Further, within a statically-typed setting, it should be possible to implement (safely) the metaprogramming patterns that have become the standard in mainstream web frameworks; we should be able to generate sub-webs specialized to database schemas, choices of form fields, etc., and the compiler should tell us that the generator always produces valid code. In this talk, I will present the Ur/Web domain-specific programming language, which satisfies both of these requirements, in addition to offering compatibility with buzzwords like ``AJAX´´ and ``Comet.´´

Adam Chlipala is currently a postdoc in computer science at Harvard University. His research interests are in applications of advanced type systems, including mechanized theorem-proving and the design and implementation of functional programming languages. He finished his PhD at Berkeley in 2007, with a thesis on verifying compilers and program analysis tools in the Coq computer proof assistant. At Harvard, he is continuing work on compiler verification, and he led a reimplementation of the Ynot library for Coq, which adds support for the construction and mostly-automated verification of higher-order, imperative programs, via separation logic. He also has a longstanding interest in tool support for web programming, and he is now developing a commercial web site (to be made public Real Soon Now) using his Ur/Web language for safe metaprogramming of AJAX applications.

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

Alex Plotnick will discuss his discovery of a potential error in the formal rules for the backquote syntax of Common Lisp.

François-René Rideau will present Interface-Passing Style as a way to achieve parametric polymorphism and more in implementing algorithms and data-structures in Common Lisp.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, February 22nd 2010 at 1800 (6pm) at Harvard Pierce 209.

Note that it's a new location.

This is at Harvard University, in the Pierce building, part of the SEAS department. The nearest T stop is Harvard Square station on the Red Line. We suggest you enter Pierce Hall from Oxford Street. The entrance is the one on the right, and it has ``Pierce Hall´´ written above it. From there, you go up the stairs one level and arrive almost directly outside Pierce 209, the meeting room. Beware that the building normally closes at 6pm (time that the meeting begins) though we'll try to leave that particular entrance open for late-comers.

SEAS maps and direction: http://www.seas.harvard.edu/our-school/map-directions

Many thanks go to Adam Chlipala for arranging for the room, and to Harvard University for welcoming us.

4 No Dinner

We haven't been able to renew sponsorship from our usual partners for 2010, and are not planning to have after-meeting buffet anymore at this point. A group will probably form to have dinner somewhere around Harvard Square.

5 More about the Meeting

The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on Monday, January 25th 2010 had about 20 participants. Ryan Culpepper spoke about PLT Scheme Macros. http:// fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Volunteers to give Lightning Talks are also sought. http://fare.livejournal.com/143723.html

For more information, see our web site http://boston-lisp.org/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http:// fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.