[TYPES/announce] reviewing, conference presentations, conference vs journal publications

[Greg Morrisett]

Deepak Kapur wrote:
 > How about the seemingly radical idea of allowing almost all
 > submissions/abstracts to be presented at prestigious CS conferences
 > including POPL, a tradition that has been successfully practiced (I
 > hope) by almost all other disciplines including physics, mathematics,
 > economics, etc., but appears to be so foreign and unacceptable to most
 > of us?

I was going to suggest something similar -- the next time you
write a letter of recommendation for person X, just say that all
of X's papers should've been accepted into POPL.  That way,
everyone will get a job with tenure!  Or, we could just rename
all SIGPLAN conferences and workshops to "POPL"!  To distinguish
them and make sure there's no bias in the title, we could just
name them after the month they are in (POPL-Jan, POPL-Feb, etc.)

Seriously, let me suggest that the community has already adapted
to the "POPL does not admit enough papers" problem.  Authors send
their revised papers to the next conference (e.g., ICFP, OOPSLA,
ESOP, SAS, VMCAI, etc.)  This has helped to raise the quality of these
other venues to the point where I'm seriously impressed by people
who have papers in these settings.  So what's happened is that
the field has grown, there are more good papers, and so there
are more good venues.  IMHO, POPL retains such influence in part
for historical reasons, and in part because there is still a
quality gap.  If there weren't, then someone who only has
papers at ICFP or only OOPSLA wouldn't have trouble getting
a position, compared to someone who has POPL papers.

So again, I'm confused about what is broken and what we're trying
to fix.

-Greg