Lambda the Ultimate

A blog post by Crista Lopes discussing the evolution of CS papers away from positions into the realm of science; excerpt:

Note this (Dijkstra's GOTO considered harmful) was not a letter to the editor, it was a full-blown technical, peer-reviewed paper published in a Mathematical journal. Seen in the light of current-day peer reviewing practices in CS, even considering the fact that the paper was proposing a clear solution for a clear problem, this paper would likely be shot down. First, the problem for which the solution was proposed was clear but not well motivated: how important was it for programs [of the time] to call routines recursively? — maybe it wasn’t important at all! If it was important, what were other people doing about it? Any paper with only 1 reference in the bibliography goes immediately to the reject pile. Second, given that the concept had already been proposed (in writing) by H. Waldburger, the author of this paper would at least be requested to express his ideas in terms of how they were different from those described in H. Waldburger’s paper rather than spending most of the paper describing how to do procedure calls using stacks. Finally, the work is borderline an “engineering issue” rather than a scientific one.

These are complaints often seen in today’s CS peer reviews.