Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

Groovy Compiler Metaprogramming for Fun and Profit

"A language should have access to its own abstract syntax" - John McCarthy, Father of Lisp. Well, now Groovy 1.6 does! This talk is about why AST transformations are important, what you can do with them, and where the language world is headed. We'll dive into some of the useful Groovy annotations and libraries being written that harness AST transformations, see how to write our own, and work with the brand new AST tools in 1.7. At the end we'll prognosticate about the future of programming languages in general, and hypothesize about where the Groovy features fit into the history of languages. Fun!

Hamlet D'Arcy

Hamlet D'Arcy

Hamlet D'Arcy has been writing software for about a decade, and has spent considerable time coding in Groovy, C++, and Java. He's passionate about learning new languages and different ways to think about problems, and recently he's been discovering the joys of both F# and Scheme. He's an active member of the Groovy Users of Minnesota and the Object Technology User Group, is a contributor to a few open source projects (including Groovy and the IDEA Groovy Plugin), blogs regularly at http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com and can be contacted at hamletdrc@gmail.com.