The DYLA Workshop series is focused on the revival of dynamic languages. The advent of Java and C# has been a major breakthrough in the adoption of object-oriented languages. It turned academic features like interfaces, garbage collection and meta-programming into technologies generally accepted by industry. However, the massive adoption of these languages now also gives rise to a growing awareness of their limitations. A number of reactions from industry testify this: an invokedynamic bytecode instruction will be included in the next Java virtual machine; Microsoft’s dynamic language runtime (DLR) is gaining popularity; C# 4 will adopt dynamic as a valid static type. Google released V8, a new virtual machine for Javascript. Gartner prognoses further growth of dynamic languages.
Researchers and practitioners feel themselves wrestling with the static type systems, the overly complex abstract grammars, the simplistic concurrency provisions, the very limited reflection capabilities and the absence of higher-order language constructs such as delegation, closures and continuations. On the one hand, dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and Lua are getting ever more popular. Academia has a major role to play in this picture by helping pushing such languages into the mainstream. On the other hand, this requires us to look back and pick up what is out there in existing dynamic languages (such as Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Self, …) to be recovered for the future. We need to further explore the power of future dynamic language constructs in the context of new challenging fields such as aspect-orientation, pervasive computing, mobile code, context-aware computing, etc.