EVENTS
ERCIM News No.47, October 2001 [contents]

Sponsored by ERCIM

ECOOP 2001 - 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

by László Kozma


ECOOP 2001 took place at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary from 18 to 22 June 2001. It was organized under the auspices of AITO (Association internationale pour les technologies objects), with sponsorship from IQSOFT, the Hungarian Ministry of Education, NOKIA, GRAPHISOFT, Microsoft Research, ERCIM, ERICSSON, VT-SOFT, SZÁMALK and SZÁMITÁSTECHNIKA. About four hundred people participated in the events.

The conference was chaired by Gerti Kappel from Johannes Kepler University, Linz and László Varga from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. The Programme Committee was chaired by Jørgen Lindskov Knudsen from University of Aarhus, Denmark.

The first two days (Monday 18 and Tuesday 19) were dedicated to workshops and tutorials. During the last three days of the week (20-22), the main conference took place together with an exhibition, demos and poster sessions.

22 workshops and 21 tutorials were selected out of respectively 30 and 48 high quality proposals. The opening keynote address was given by Charles Simonyi from Microsoft Research. His paper entitled ‘Languages, Objects, and Intentionality’, was a very impressive discussion on ‘intentionality’ as an important aspect of natural language, and the uses of intentionality in computer languages and in object-oriented programming. Erik Meijer, Microsoft gave the second invited talk entitled ‘Scripting .NET Using Mondrian’. He spoke about Mondrian, a functional scripting language designed especially for the new Microsoft .NET platform. Mondrian is useful for functional programmers who would like to be able to inter-work more closely with other languages that target the .NET Common Language Runtime and for object-oriented programmers who would like to explore being able to write and access objects written in functional languages.

Alistair Cocburn, Humans and Technology gave the third invited talk entitled ‘People and the Limits of Methodology’. He spoke about that people had a nasty habit of running neatly drown up methodologies. It is not that they intend to do, it just that people are packed as ‘individuals’ while metho-dologies are packed in ‘roles’.

Eighteen technical papers out of the 108 submitted papers were selected for presentation and covered a broad range of topics related to the object-oriented paradigm including sharing and encapsulation, type inference and static analysis, language design, implementation techniques, reflection and concurrency, testing and design.

From an organizer’s point of view, the conference was very successful. The technical presentations, tutorials and workshops were of high quality. We were successful in attracting many young researchers whose enthusiasm and fresh ideas greatly contributed to the success of the event. The conference proceedings were published by Springer - Verlag, Berlin - Heidelberg in Germany.

Please contact:
László Kozma - Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
Tel: +36 1 209 0555
E-mail: kozma@ludens.elte.hu