“What?”, you ask, “are there no Grace talks at SPLASH this year?” Well, yes and no.

There are no Grace papers at SPLASH this year, in the sense that there are no papers describing changes to the Grace language. However, there will be two talks that use Grace to explain something important about programming languages. And that is, after all, is the very purpose of an educational programming language.

The first (on Monday) is an invited talk at NOOL , a workshop on “NOO” object-oriented languages. The corresponding paper, “The Essence of Inheritance”, is in a Festscrift for Phil Walder. Roly Perera and Tobias Wrigstad asked me to reprise the presentation that I made in Edinburgh for NOOL. The ideas discussed here apply to any OO Language, but we were really pleased with the elegance with which they could be described in Grace.

The second talk is a presentation in the Onward! Essays session (after lunch on Wednesday). It’s an Essay “The Left-hand of Equals”, and explains the rationale behind the choices we made in the design of Grace’s standard libraries.

I will be please to chat about either paper, or my current experiences teaching Grace programming to a class of ~150 first-years students.