Abstract:

Scripting languages are playing an increasing role in today’s software landscape due to their support for rapid and exploratory development. They typically have lightweight syntax, weak data privacy, dynamic typing, powerful aggregate data types, and allow execution of the completed parts of incomplete programs. While many of their uses are web-centric, scripting languages also show up in non-traditional domains such as space exploration and banking. Considering their importance to the practice of computing, it is surprising to see that, in academic circles, scripting is still often viewed as an undisciplined and unprincipled attempt at programming. In this talk, I will summarize work on bridging the divide between scripting and programming. I will motivate our investigations with some success stories of scripting languages used in unusual places. Then I will dispel some misconceptions about the nature of scripts with preliminary results from a large corpus analysis of programs written in a popular scripting language.

Biography：

Jan Vitek is a Professor of Computer Science. He has been a Faculty member at Purdue University since 1999 where he cofounded the S3 Lab, and was an Academic Visitor at IBM Watson. He obtained his PhD from the University of Geneva in 1999, and a MSc from the University of Victoria in 1995. His area of research lies at the intersection between programming languages and software engineering with applications to real-time computing, concurrent and distributed computing and information security. Prof. Vitek led the Ovm project which resulted in the first open source real-time Java virtual machine to be successfully flight-tested. He has since investigated virtual machine technologies for safety-critical embedded systems in avionics and aerospace. He has been general chair of ISMM as well as program chair of ECOOP, VEE, Coordination, and TOOLS. Professor Vitek is a member of the JSR-302 Safety Critical Java expert group and of the IFIP 2.4 working group on compilers and software technologies.