[PRL] may be

[Johan Ovlinger]

"Karl Lieberherr" (Thu, 06 Nov 2003 09:16:42 EST) proclaims:
> It should be noted that OOPSLA accepts every year some "idea" papers that
> describe useful ideas in object-oriented software. Those idea papers have
> typically informal semantics that are later made more precise.

<rant> 
I've been growing increasingly fed up with the uneven quality of
OOPSLA papers. As far as I am concerned, there should be bars of
desirability and verifiability that need to be passed. Lowest for
workshop papers, higher for conference papers, and highest for
journals.

I think that you have just described a perfect workshop paper.  An
idea paper basically argues that some feature would be cool, but with
no or small justification of why and how.

The main difference between a workshop paper and a conference paper
should be that the reader need not figure things out for themselves to
judge whether the topic is worthwhile.

Else, I could just publish one paper after the other on the imaginary
language "DWIM", which always does exactly what the programmer wants,
and only when someone tries to implement it along my hand-wavy sugges-
tions turns out to be unworkable.  Later, when state of the art in AI
finally makes DWIM possible to implement, I can claim visionary status
and accept the accolades of my fans.  

Mind you, the ideas track would make a great workshop...
</rant>

What's more, I think it is unfair to label EA as such a paper. I see
it less as a _suggestion_ about a particular language feature, and
more as an _identification_ of a kind of language feature.  I think
someone (Rich?) made this observation during the presentation: this
paper is best approached like the GoF book. Just like the Visitor
pattern, the usefullness of the GoF book isn't one particular
implementation of the pattern, but the vocabulary to speak about a
recurring programming idiom.

The paper then goes further to suggest properties the idiom could have
when promoted to language feature, but that is just a bonus -- it has
already made its main contribution.