Invited Speakers

Keynote Talk: Language ownership: key moments in the lifetime of Ada

Speakers
Tullio Vardanega, University of Padua

Date
Wednesday, 13 June

Abstract

Who is the owner of a programming language? The notion of ownership has a legal connotation, which revolves around intellectual or commercial property rights. Ownership associates with responsibility. Linguists tell us that (natural) languages emerge from social requirements and evolve with the growth of the social fabric of the linguistic community. In some sense, this should also be true of programming languages. Which means that ownership is a social responsibility. There are moments in the life of programming languages where very little is required of some members of the language community, as most – if not all – seems to happen via paid roles and tasks. There are other times, however, in which the economic sustainability of those paid roles and tasks is threatened. It is at those times especially that the entire language community, regardless of the assigned roles in it, is urged to become more directly responsible for the continued existence of the language. This is one such moment, I think, for Ada, and this understanding has prompted me into action, which in this talk I would like to extend to the audience.

Short Bios

Tullio Vardanega holds an MSc from the University of Pisa, IT (1986), and a PhD from the Technical University of Delft, NL (1998). After working as PI at a small consultancy firm at Pisa between 1987 and 1991, he was with the European Space Agency in the Netherlands between 1991 and 2001. Since January 2002, he works at the University of Padua, Italy. Owing to the rich fabric of industrial and academic contacts he built over time, he has run numerous collaborative projects, on international and national research funding. In addition to being a long-time member of IEEE and ACM, he is the Italian delegate in technical expert groups of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22: WG9 (Ada) and WG23 (Programming Language Vulnerabilities). From 2004 until early 2024, he was the chairperson of Ada-Europe, before helping to found the Ada User Society, in an effort to ensure the continuation of Ada as international standard.