Independent Study Schedule

This semester I'll be doing an independent study -- a survey of "dynamic languages" -- with Evan Chang. Each week I'll read a paper, and write a discussion of it, which he and I will use as a starting point for an hour-long weekly meeting. I'll post the discussion notes on this blog. The papers are listed here. Some of them are quite long and may have to be covered in halves.

1. Herbert Stoyan, "Early LISP History", date unknown, pages unknown
2. John McCarthy, "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I", 1960, 34 pages
3. Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger, "A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence", 1973, 11 pages.
4. John Backus, "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?", 1978, 28 pages
   
5. Ken Iverson, "Notation as a tool of thought", 1980, 22 pages
6. Pattie Maes, "Concepts and experiments in computational reflection", 1987, 8 pages
7. Alan C. Kay, "An Early History of Smalltalk", 1993, 40 pages
8. L. Peter Deutsch and Allan M. Schiffman, "Efficient implementation of the Smalltalk-80 system", 1984, 5 pages
9. David Ungar and Randall B. Smith, "SELF: The power of simplicity", 1991, 18 pages
10. Craig Chambers, David Ungar, and Elgin Lee, "An efficient implementation of SELF, a dynamically-typed object-oriented language based on prototypes", 1991, 38 pages.
11. Cartwright and Fagan. "Soft Typing", 1991, 16 pages.
12. Aiken, Wimmers, and Lakshman. "Soft Typing with Conditional Types", 1994, 10 pages.