Each year the Dynamic Languages Symposium awards the DLS Most Notable Paper award to a paper published 10 years earlier in the symposium proceedings.

This year, our 2007 paper “Mirages: Behavioral Intercession in a Mirror-based Architecture” (link to paper) won the Most Notable Paper award.

The paper explored a new mechanism to virtualize objects in object-oriented programming languages (in particular, in the AmbientTalk programming language which I co-developed with my co-author Stijn Mostinckx as part of my PhD work). This work laid the foundation for my later work on the JavaScript Proxy API together with Mark S. Miller, which was standardized as part of ECMAScript 2015 and is now available in all major browsers.

The award citation reads:

The 2007 DLS paper “Mirages: Behavioral Intercession in a Mirror-based Architecture” combined the ideas of explicit mirrors for reflective introspection and modification with implicit mirrors for behavioral intercession. The work in this paper influenced and inspired the design of proxies in the JavaScript language, where it now has applications in areas such as security, testing, and virtualization of the DOM.

I’m honored to have received this award from the DLS community, which is one of the premier forums to discuss advances in dynamic languages.