Lambda the Ultimate

As conferences get older, they tend to require a greater burden of proof. Program committees reject papers as "too early", and want more demonstrations that the ideas are sound. This is why conferences tend to lose the excitement of the early days.

Onward! is a conference that focuses on innovative ideas about software. The program committee is looking for ideas that, if they succeed, will make a big impact. Though the committee has to be convinced that the idea is reasonable, it is less concerned with proof than other program committees. Essays and full papers are due April 20, and short papers are due June 26. Onward! is also looking for workshop proposals and films. See http://www.onward-conference.org/

Essays are an unusual and noteworthy part of Onward! An Onward! essay is a thoughtful reflection about some aspect of sofftware technology. Its goal is to help the reader to share a new insight, engage with an argument, or wrestle with a dilemma.

Some of the essays that have appeared at Onward! are

• Dan Grossman "The transactional memory / garbage collection analogy"
• Dick Gabriel "Designed as Designer"
• Friedrich Steimann "The paradoxical success of aspect-oriented programming"

Although Onward! was originally a part of OOPSLA, and is being colocated with it this year, you can see from these papers that it is not restricted to object-oriented programming, or even programming languages. However, it gives a welcome reception to new ideas in programming languages, so if you have something new that you'd like to promote, I urge you to consider submitting it to Onward!