J is for JavaScript

Here are the slides from Olivier's talk, and the J is for JavaScript paper via. Ken's web page.

As already noted by Walid, the talk spurred much discussion on the importance of homomorphic translations. The issue raised was that homomorphic translations are trivial and uninteresting. In response, questions were raised as to what problems do not have a homomorphic translation followed by comments on how even a simple alpha-conversion is of interest in the context of DSLs. Our point however, is that translations should be as homomorphic as possible. The benefit being preservation of operational intuition.

• For the programmer, this means better understanding the behavior of the program after translation.
• For the host system (compiler and/or runtime) more structural information is available for optimization.
  

Aside, we do not believe translations should be complex for the sake of complexity.

We would like to thank everybody for a great conference and for the following discussions. Please feel free to post further comments and questions in this thread or by email.