Robert Hirschfeld

The reader controls the action in this story about several young people who go looking for a missing friend on Halloween night.

Attack of the living mask

Tim Felgentreff

Fabio Niephaus

Software development tools that work and behave consistently across different programming languages are helpful for developers, because they do not have to familiarize themselves with new tooling whenever they decide to use a new language. Also, being able to combine multiple programming languages in a program increases reusability, as developers do not have to recreate software frameworks and libraries in the language they develop in and can reuse existing software instead. However, developers often have a broad choice with regard to tools, some of which are designed for only one specific programming language. Various Integrated Development Environments have support for multiple languages, but are usually unable to provide a consistent programming experience due to different features of language runtimes. Furthermore, common mechanisms that allow reuse of software written in other languages usually use the operating system or a network connection as the abstract layer. Tools, however, often cannot support such indirections well and are therefore less useful in debugging scenarios for example. In this report, we present a novel approach that aims to improve the programming experience with regard to working with multiple high-level programming languages. As part of this approach, we reuse the tools of a Smalltalk programming environment for other languages and build a multi-language virtual execution environment which is able to provide the same runtime capabilities for all languages. The prototype system Squimera is an implementation of our approach and demonstrates that it is possible to reuse development tools, so that they behave in the same way across all supported programming languages. In addition, it provides convenient means to reuse and even mix software libraries and frameworks written in different languages without breaking the debugging experience.

a live, Smalltalk-based IDE for dynamic programming languages

Squimera

Gilad Bracha

Felix Geller

Pattern matching is a well-established concept in the functional programming community. It provides the means for concisely identifying and destructuring values of interest. This enables a clean separation of data structures and respective functionality, as well as dispatching functionality based on more than a single value. Unfortunately, expressive pattern matching facilities are seldomly incorporated in present object-oriented programming languages. We present a seamless integration of pattern matching facilities in an object-oriented and dynamically typed programming language: Newspeak. We describe language extensions to improve the practicability and integrate our additions with the existing programming environment for Newspeak. This report is based on the first author’s master’s thesis.

Pattern Matching for an Object-oriented and Dynamically Typed Programming Language

Kim Rose

The Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) is a forum for the discussion of topics relating to computer systems and languages that are able to bootstrap, implement, modify, and maintain themselves. One property of these systems is that their implementation is based onsmall but powerfulabstractions;examples include (amongst others) Squeak/Smalltalk, COLA, Klein/Self, PyPy/Python, Rubinius/Ruby,andLisp.Suchsystemsaretheenginesoftheirownreplacement, giving researchers and developers great power to experiment with, and explore future directions from within, their own small language kernels. S3 took place on May 15–16, 2008 at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany. It was an exciting opportunity for researchers and prac- tioners interested in self-sustaining systems to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development. S3 provided an - portunity for a community to gather and discuss the need for self-sustainability in software systems, and to share and explore thoughts on why such systems are needed and how they can be created and deployed. Analogies were made, for example, with evolutionary cycles, and with urban design and the subsequent inevitable socially-driven change. TheS3participantsleftwithagreatersenseofcommunityandanenthusiasm for probing more deeply into this subject. We see the need for self-sustaining systems becoming critical not only to the developer’s community, but to e- users in business, academia, learning and play, and so we hope that this S3 workshop will become the ?rst of many.

First Workshop, S3 2008 Potsdam, Germany, May 15-16, 2008, Proceedings

Self-Sustaining Systems

Wanda Baltzer

Theresa Hradilak

Lara Pfennigschmidt

Luc Maurice Prestin

Moritz Spranger

Simon Stadlinger

Leo Wendt

Jens Lincke

Patrick Rein

Luke Church

The noble way to substantiate decisions that affect many people is to ask these people for their opinions. For governments that run whole countries, this means asking all citizens for their views to consider their situations and needs. Organizations such as Africa's Voices Foundation, who want to facilitate communication between decision-makers and citizens of a country, have difficulty mediating between these groups. To enable understanding, statements need to be summarized and visualized. Accomplishing these goals in a way that does justice to the citizens' voices and situations proves challenging. Standard charts do not help this cause as they fail to create empathy for the people behind their graphical abstractions. Furthermore, these charts do not create trust in the data they are representing as there is no way to see or navigate back to the underlying code and the original data. To fulfill these functions, visualizations would highly benefit from interactions to explore the displayed data, which standard charts often only limitedly provide. To help improve the understanding of people's voices, we developed and categorized 80 ideas for new visualizations, new interactions, and better connections between different charts, which we present in this report. From those ideas, we implemented 10 prototypes and two systems that integrate different visualizations. We show that this integration allows consistent appearance and behavior of visualizations. The visualizations all share the same main concept: representing each individual with a single dot. To realize this idea, we discuss technologies that efficiently allow the rendering of a large number of these dots. With these visualizations, direct interactions with representations of individuals are achievable by clicking on them or by dragging a selection around them. This direct interaction is only possible with a bidirectional connection from the visualization to the data it displays. We discuss different strategies for bidirectional mappings and the trade-offs involved. Having unified behavior across visualizations enhances exploration. For our prototypes, that includes grouping, filtering, highlighting, and coloring of dots. Our prototyping work was enabled by the development environment Lively4. We explain which parts of Lively4 facilitated our prototyping process. Finally, we evaluate our approach to domain problems and our developed visualization concepts. Our work provides inspiration and a starting point for visualization development in this domain. Our visualizations can improve communication between citizens and their government and motivate empathetic decisions. Our approach, combining low-level entities to create visualizations, provides value to an explorative and empathetic workflow. We show that the design space for visualizing this kind of data has a lot of potential and that it is possible to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to data analysis.

An individual-centered approach to visualize people’s opinions and demographic informationc

Michael Haupt

Stefan Marr

Business process models are abstractions of concrete operational procedures that occur in the daily business of organizations. To cope with the complexity of these models, business process model abstraction has been introduced recently. Its goal is to derive from a detailed process model several abstract models that provide a high-level understanding of the process. While techniques for constructing abstract models are reported in the literature, little is known about the relationships between process instances and abstract models. In this paper we show how the state of an abstract activity can be calculated from the states of related, detailed process activities as they happen. The approach uses activity state propagation. With state uniqueness and state transition correctness we introduce formal properties that improve the understanding of state propagation. Algorithms to check these properties are devised. Finally, we use behavioral profiles to identify and classify behavioral inconsistencies in abstract process models that might occur, once activity state propagation is used.

A Virtual Machine Product Line

CSOM/PL

Robert Hirschfeld

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