The term “Lightweight Language”, or sometimes “LL”, indicates a group of dynamic languages consisting of Perl, PHP, Ruby, Javascript and others, especially in Japan. With these languages, it is easy to create code and bug-fixes for programmers and developers. Panelists and participants alike discussed the future of their favorite LL.
Celebrating the sixth holding of the conference, Larry Wall, known as the author of the Perl programming language, was invited. In his keynote, entitled "Rules that are meant to be broken," he introduced the new intensive Domain Specific Language (DSL) support in Perl 6.
With his background as a linguistic scholar, the influence of culture in language has been emphasized throughout his speech. “We do tell you how to think. We don’t tell you what to think,” he said, explaining the TMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it) slogan in the Perl culture. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale. “We learn natural languages by repeating what other people say. We learn programming languages by copying what other people do, and eventually, we discover the meaning” he said, being proud of new DSL feature in Perl 6, designed to support “Polymorphism” to make a new sub-language based on existing implementation.
In the session "To invent the future by LL," five language developers, Larry Wall (Perl), Matz (Ruby), Eijiro Sumii (MinCaml http://min-caml.sourceforge.net/index-e.html), Yoshikatsu Fujita (Ypsilon http://code.google.com/p/ypsilon/) and Higepon (Mosh http://code.google.com/p/mosh-scheme/), sat down to discuss what computer language will look in the future. "I don't think 'programming language' will be alive 100 years from now," said Matz, the inventor of the Ruby language. It was a very active discussion, where radical opinions vigorously laid out and defended.
In the section "LL and Art," media art applications of Lightweight Languages were discussed. Ichitaro Masuda, a media artist famous for his work “Hao-hao”, and Daito Manabe, a VJ artist known for physical sensors, showed prototyping of a physical device with Ruby scripts and GAINER+, an easy-to-use general I/O device adaptor. They demonstrated live coding of an acceleration sensor attached to a virtual cube drawn using OpenGL. They also showed some of their design projects made with Lightweight Languages based various frameworks, such as RubyCocoa or Proce55ing.
Other topics discussed in the event included coding golf techniques http://codegolf.com/ , web framework design, and many smaller lightning talks. Although the event lasted more than 10 hours, it was very entertaining and insightful. I am looking forward to attending the next meeting.
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