The DEFUN 2009 schedule has recently gone up. I haven’t seen many posts about it, so here’s my take on what looks good. DEFUN is looking pretty good for Scheme, which is a pleasant surprise; it is well known that Scheme is not mainstream at ICFP. There are threeawesome tutorials on the schedule, covering DSLs, web programming, and embedded programming respectively. I’m particularly excited by the DSL tutorial, given by Matthew Flatt andEli Barzilay. It is my belief that PLT Scheme is the best platform available for developing DSLs, but not many people are aware of its full abilities. I hope this tutorial will go a way to getting the information out there.

Session A5(c) most intrigues me of the remaining tutorials. Ur/Webthrows a whole pile of research into type systems at the problem of developing web applications. Through the power of dependent types Ur/Web claims to eliminate invalid HTML, invalid SQL, code-injection attacks, and bunch of other issues. I certainly want to better understand how it works, and perhaps see if we can apply some of the metaprogramming ideas to our own libraries.

If you’re interested in DEFUN you’ll probably also be interested in the CUFP 2009 schedule. I should be at both, as well as most of ICFP. If you’d like to chat, drop me an email.