General Chairs' Welcome

The Fourth Annual ACM International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Indianapolis and SPLASH 2013, the umbrella venue for the 28th OOPSLA, plus Onward!, Wavefront, and the Dynamic Languages Symposium. Moreover, SPLASH 2013 is proud to host the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts & Experiences (GPCE), co-locating with the International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE). SPLASH this year revives the former educator’s symposium in its new guise as SPLASH-E, for discussion of Computer Science education uniquely embedded within the culture of visionary research and practice embodied by OOPSLA, Onward!, and Wavefront. SPLASH-E is timely in that it coincides with the finalization of the ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curriculum 2013. This year also sees the return to SPLASH of tutorials and tech-talks, plus a new twist in the form of the synergistic SPLASH-I as a forum for acclaimed speakers from industry, all offered free to SPLASH attendees.

Drawing on the long tradition of OOPSLA, and with the addition of Onward! and Wavefront, SPLASH embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery to make it the premier conference at the intersection of programming, languages, and software engineering. OOPSLA was the incubator for CRC cards, CLOS, design patterns, Self, the agile methodologies, service- oriented architectures, wikis, Unified Modeling Language (UML), test driven design (TDD), refactoring, Java, dynamic compilation, and aspect-oriented programming, just to name a few. Onward! focuses on everything to do with programming and software: including processes, methods, languages, communities, and applications. Onward! is more radical, more visionary, and more open than other conferences to not yet well-proven but well-argued ideas. Wavefront is about how industry applies the lessons learned from the software development community in deploying today’s software and systems, and how the community can learn from what is happening in the trenches of software engineering. The Dynamic Languages Symposium is the place where researchers and practitioners come together to discuss the new crop of wildly successful dynamic languages, their implementation, and their applications.

Guest conferences at SPLASH this year include GPCE and SLE. The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts & Experiences (GPCE) is a venue for researchers and practitioners interested in techniques that use program generation, domain-specific languages, and component deployment to increase programmer productivity, improve software quality, and shorten the time-to-market of software products. The International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) is devoted to topics related to artificial languages in software engineering. SLE’s mission is to encourage and organize communication among communities that have traditionally looked at software languages from different and yet complementary perspectives.

This year we are extremely fortunate to have four keynote speakers who tap into broad and deep SPLASH themes. Kathryn McKinley looks at the impact that heterogeneous hardware is having on the design and implementation of software abstractions for parallelism. Greg Wilson asks why the gap between research and practice remains so wide, and suggests how to narrow it. Molham Aref explores declarative programming for the cloud to combine rapid prototyping with performance in the deployment of large-scale cloud applications. Gilad Bracha ponders the history of innovation in programming languages and what is yet to come, asking how the elegance of Lisp, Simula, Actors, Beta, Smalltalk and Self led to the reality of C++, Java, Javascript, Perl, Python and PHP.

Organizing SPLASH has been a long march, alleviated greatly by the enthusiasm and talent of all those who have volunteered their time to make it a success. We are especially grateful to all the members of the Organizing Committee, comprising the committee chairs of all the conferences and events, and to our corporate supporters for their generosity. All the program chairs, aided by their program committees and reviewers, are to be congratulated on putting together such a strong program of papers and presentations. We thank the authors and presenters for their research, experiences, and valuable insights, which above anything else are the only reason for a conference like SPLASH in the first place. Finally, we thank you, the attendees, for being here to experience the wonder and excitement of SPLASH! We hope that you find the resulting program to be interesting and thought-provoking, and that your interactions at SPLASH with other researchers, educators, students, and practitioners from around the world are stimulating and fruitful.

Antony Hosking
SPLASH’13 General co-Chair
Purdue University, USA

Patrick Eugster
SPLASH’13 General co-Chair
Purdue University, USA