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

[Alessio Guglielmi]

Hello,

At 11:55 +0100 13/1/2010, Derek Dreyer wrote:
>>And the conferences should serve the purpose of disseminating new 
>>ideas, not of distributing medals.
>
>Given that there have been several posts with something approaching 
>this sentiment, I would like to respectfully, and strongly, 
>disagree. POPL and other top conferences have been a place where 
>many great *ideas* in programming languages have been first set 
>forth.

Yes, nobody is disputing that, but not all the ideas have the right 
granularity to fit the conference format, which is the problem that 
many of us lament. In other words, the problem is that giving 
excessive importance to conference publication distorts research 
towards what fits conferences, which is not necessarily bad, but it's 
certainly not all there is.

This is particularly bad in certain areas and for the young 
researchers, who are told `publish several small easily digestible 
things at conferences (or perish)' instead of `do good research'. Of 
course there is, for the obvious dynamics, a strong cultural 
attractor that tends to blur those two concepts, and I think that 
this is precisely what should be resisted.

>>There are so many `papers' produced, that, right now, in computer 
>>`science', not even the authors read their own work. Thanks to cut 
>>& paste we have now a ratio of reads/writes < 1.
>
>I don't know what you're talking about: I read way more papers than 
>I write, and I read way more conference papers than journal articles 
>in a given year, often because I am asked to review them!  Most of 
>what I learn about new ideas in PL is from reading conference papers.

I didn't mean to be taken so literally. But then again, it really 
depends on the areas and on what we mean by `reading'. For example, 
POPL prospective authors used to be advised, in the call for papers, 
that their works would have been judged after a 40-minute `reading'. 
Should we really count this reading?

It happened to me to review a short and very well written paper (for 
a journal) whose claims looked to me absolutely impossible, 
outrageous. After reading (= studying) the paper for days, I still 
was in the dark, and had to dig out some older results the paper was 
relying upon, and this took me weeks of study. The paper was right, 
it was accepted, and it changed dramatically my own research ever 
since. A fantastic idea. I wonder what I would have done of that 
paper in 40 minutes.

Ciao,

-Alessio