[TYPES/announce] Two phase reviewing for POPL; a response

[Robert Harper]

After reading many of the thoughtful responses, I thought it might be  
worthwhile to add a few further remarks:

1. Mostly, I am against the ever-increasing officiousness of the  
conference reviewing process: double-blind reviews, author response  
period, two-stage review process, absurd conflict of interest rules,  
program committee make-up restrictions, etc, etc, etc.  It's all  
totally unnecessary and in many cases counterproductive.  For example,  
the outlandish conflict of interest rules have ensured in many cases  
that no competent person can review a submission, because anyone with  
any expertise may well have had a beer with the author within the last  
fifteen years (or whatever the current rule may be).

2. I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that it may make sense to  
expand the number of papers presented at the top conferences.  Here I  
find Mike Mislove's proposal most persuasive (in fact, we're already  
doing this to some extent).  Why not hold a Federated Programming  
Languages Conference in which we, at least on occasion and perhaps  
regularly, seek to consolidate as many meetings in the PL area as we  
can to encourage publication and attendance?

3. The tenure and promotion process is always a vexed issue because  
the fact is that the decision is pretty much invariably made in a  
state of ignorance by most of those involved.  We rely heavily on  
letters of reference, and letter writers back up their claims about a  
candidate by pointing to publications in venues like POPL.  This  
process is imperfect, but it's not as though there's a better one just  
waiting to be adopted.  Meanwhile, why should POPL neuter itself as  
playing a decisive role in determining the direction of the field?  It  
will be determined _somehow_ by a process that is surely to be  
imperfect; I don't see that relyng on publication at POPL as an all- 
that-terrible a way to do things.

Bob