Higher-order, Typed, Inferred, Strict: ACM SIGPLAN ML Family Workshop Thursday September 4, 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden (immediately following ICFP and preceding OCaml Users and Developers Workshop) Call For Papers http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/ML14.html News: Post-proceedings will be published in EPTCS ML is a very large family of programming languages that includes Standard ML, OCaml, F#, SML#, Manticore, MetaOCaml, JoCaml, Alice ML, Dependent ML, Flow Caml, and many others. All ML languages, beside the great deal of syntax, share several fundamental traits. They are all higher-order, strict, mostly pure, and typed, with algebraic and other data types. Their type systems inherit from Hindley-Milner. The development of these languages has inspired a significant amount of computer science research and influenced a number of programming languages, including Haskell, Scala and Clojure, as well as Rust, ATS and many others. ML workshops have been held in affiliation with ICFP continuously since 2005. This workshop specifically aims to recognize the entire extended ML family and to provide the forum to present and discuss common issues, both practical (compilation techniques, implementations of concurrency and parallelism, programming for the Web) and theoretical (fancy types, module systems, metaprogramming). The scope of the workshop includes all aspects of the design, semantics, theory, application, implementation, and teaching of the members of the ML family. We also encourage presentations from related languages (such as Scala, Rust, Nemerle, ATS, etc.), to exchange experience of further developing ML ideas. The ML family workshop will be held in close coordination with the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop. Format Since 2010, the ML workshop has adopted an informal model. Presentations are selected from submitted abstracts. There are no published proceedings, so any contributions may be submitted for publication elsewhere. We hope that this format encourages the presentation of exciting (if unpolished) research and deliver a lively workshop atmosphere. Each presentation should take 20-25 minutes, except demos, which should take 10-15 minutes. The exact time will be decided based on the number of accepted submissions. The presentations will likely be recorded. Post-conference proceedings The post-proceedings of selected papers from the ML Family and the OCaml Users and Developers workshops will be published in the Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS). The Program Committee shall invite interested authors of selected presentations to expand their abstract for inclusion in the proceedings. The submissions are to be reviewed according to the EPTCS standards. Coordination with the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop The OCaml workshop is seen as more practical and is dedicated in significant part to the OCaml community building and the evolution of the OCaml system. In contrast, the ML family workshop is not focused on any language in particular, is more research oriented, and deals with general issues of the ML-style programming and type systems. Yet there is an overlap, which we are keen to explore in various ways. The authors who feel their submission fits both workshops are encouraged to mention it at submission time or contact the Program Chairs. Scope We acknowledge the whole breadth of the ML family and aim to include languages that are closely related (although not by blood), such as Rust, ATS, Scala, Typed Clojure. Those languages have implemented and investigated run-time and type system choices that may be worth considering for OCaml, F# and other ML languages. We also hope that the exposure to the state of the art ML might favorably influence those related languages. Specifically, we seek research presentations on topics including but not limited to * Design: concurrency, distribution and mobility, programming for the web and embedded systems, handling semi-structured data, facilitating interactive programming, higher forms of polymorphism, generic programming, objects * Implementation: compilation techniques, interpreters, type checkers, partial evaluators, runtime systems, garbage collectors, etc. * Type systems: fancy types, inference, effects, overloading, modules, contracts, specifications and assertions, dynamic typing, error reporting, etc. * Applications: case studies, experience reports, pearls, etc. * Environments: libraries, tools, editors, debuggers, cross-language interoperability, functional data structures, etc. * Education: ML and ML-like languages in college or high-school, in general or computer science curriculum. Four kinds of submissions will be accepted: Informed Positions, Research Presentations, Experience Reports and Demos. * Informed Positions: A justified argument for or against a language feature. The argument must be substantiated, either theoretically (e.g., by a demonstration of (un)soundness, an inference algorithm, a complexity analysis), empirically or by a substantial experience. Personal experience is accepted as justification so long as it is extensive and illustrated with concrete examples. * Research Presentations: Research presentations should describe new ideas, experimental results, or significant advances in ML-related projects. We especially encourage presentations that describe work in progress, that outline a future research agenda, or that encourage lively discussion. These presentations should be structured in a way which can be, at least in part, of interest to (advanced) users. * Experience Reports: Users are invited to submit Experience Reports about their use of ML and related languages. These presentations do not need to contain original research but they should tell an interesting story to researchers or other advanced users, such as an innovative or unexpected use of advanced features or a description of the challenges they are facing or attempting to solve. * Demos: Live demonstrations or short tutorials should show new developments, interesting prototypes, or work in progress, in the form of tools, libraries, or applications built on or related to ML. (You will need to provide all the hardware and software required for your demo; the workshop organizers are only able to provide a projector.) Important dates Monday May 19 (any time zone): Abstract submission Monday June 30: Author notification Thursday September 4, 2014: ML Family Workshop Submission Submissions should be at most two pages, in PDF format, and printable on US Letter or A4 sized paper. A submission should have a synopsis (2-3 lines) and a body between 1 and 2 pages, in one- or two-column layout. The synopsis should be suitable for inclusion in the workshop program. Submissions must be uploaded to the workshop submission website before the submission deadline (Monday May 19, 2014). For any question concerning the scope of the workshop or the submission process, please contact the program chair. Program Committee Kenichi Asai Ochanomizu University, Japan Matthew Fluet Rochester Institute of Technology, USA Jacques Garrigue Nagoya University, Japan Dave Herman Mozilla, USA Stefan Holdermans Vector Fabrics, Netherlands Oleg Kiselyov (Chair) Monterey, CA, USA Keiko Nakata Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia Didier Remy INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, France Zhong Shao Yale University, USA Hongwei Xi Boston University, USA