[PRL] may be

Karl Lieberherr lieber at ccs.neu.edu
Thu Nov 6 11:19:05 EST 2003


Matthias:
I had lunch with Dick Gabriel exactly one week ago.
Dick is the organizer of the OOPSLA onward track this year where they
accepted 3 papers out of 20 submissions he said. Our accepted paper was an
idea paper. That OOPSLA tradition lives on thanks to an innovative
Northeastern graduate.
-- Karl

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthias Felleisen [mailto:matthias at ccs.neu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 10:37 AM
To: Johan Ovlinger
Cc: lieber at ccs.neu.edu; PRL at lists.ccs.neu.edu
Subject: Re: [PRL] may be

Over the past three days, I spent time with someone who leads the
pattern community. According to him, you just insulted the pattern
community with an incredibly low blow.

Let me explain:

1. The pattern community considers GoF as "primitive." Nothing
ground breaking or earth-shattering in there.

2. The pattern community explicitly excluded academics because
they didn't want "ideas that might work, one way or another, some
day, perhaps" but things that have proven to work in three radically
different context.

3. If I understood the person correctly, they have now relaxed this
attendance rule so that tenured professors who produce implementations
for their ideas may attend.

4. They honestly don't believe in "ideas" and/or "possibly useful idom"
stuff.

5. The community is extremely vibrant and useful to many companies.
The company that is running these PLOP workshops is out of money,
because of the demand.

The person is a Northeastern graduate, and I am hoping that I can bring
him in soon for a talk and possibly more. His name is Dick Gabriel.

-- Matthias

P.S. Your rant was right on target and not a rant at all. I truly
dislike it
when people object to speaking the truth with "that's just a rant."
Sometimes
the truth has to be out there, even if it hurts.




On Thursday, November 6, 2003, at 10:03 AM, Johan Ovlinger wrote:

> "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.
>
>
>
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