Gilad Bracha will interview Alan Kay followed by live Q&A.

Fil-C is a garbage collected, capability-based variant of C and C++ that achieves complete memory safety with zero unsafe escape hatches while retaining enough compatibility that lots of existing programs compile and run with no changes. Fil-C can run things like CPython and OpenSSH. This talk describes the goals and key insights of Fil-C and shows preliminary performance data.

In recent years, AI developer tools have progressed from research projects to critical parts of the developer toolset. Today, there are over 1.8 million paid subscribers to GitHub Copilot, Google reports that 50% of their code is written with AI assistance, and TabNine estimates that 5% of all code is written by AI. These numbers will only increase as these tools continue to improve and gain further traction among developers.

Researchers in the machine learning, programming languages, and software engineering communities continue to push the boundaries of what is possible, but turning promising research results into tools that are useful at scale is hard. It involves determining the right use cases, designing the right UX, evaluating and improving quality, and many other factors.

In this talk, Eddie Aftandilian will discuss how to bridge the demo-to-real-world gap via lessons learned from building several AI developer tools at GitHub, including the original GitHub Copilot, Copilot for Docs, and Copilot Workspace.

The current hype in academia and industry is to use AI to augment, or even replace, traditional software engineers. But we should ask ourselves: is this putting the cart before the horse? The raison d’être for many software engineers is to create enterprise software that makes end-users more productive. What if we cut out the middleman and used AI to empower end-users to create their own automations directly?

In this talk, we will explore how to build a novel programming platform for end-user programming by treating LLMs as neural computers (Automind), with a Prolog-like reasoning language called Universalis as its Mentalese. If we are going to let end-users run AI-generated code autonomously, we must design safety and correctness into the language. That’s why Universalis is kept simple by design, enabling the creation of provably correct software—seen by many as the only path to controllable AGI.”

This talk is about the history of apps and their stores (in both senses of the word), individually and collectively. It presents a vision of a world where apps are not silo’ed, are secure, are always local-first, always available and always up-to-date. Parts of this world have been described before, under the heading of “objects as software services”, but much of the history has never been shared before. A much simpler model of apps is possible by combining decades old technologies that have been largely neglected by the mainstream, including object capabilities, orthogonal persistence, dynamic software update and others. We’ll show you how that vision came about, how it failed, how it might be updated and made relevant today.

Verse is the new programming language, designed at Epic Games as language of the metaverse. The talk will be a whirlwind tour of Verse and some of its unusual features.

The main JavaScript engine vendors share their opinion on the evolution of the JavaScript engines.