Lambda the Ultimate

LtU generally is not appropriate venue for posting call-for-papers, but there have been exceptions, if the CFP has an exceptionally wide appeal. Hopefully FLOPS 2016 might qualify.
http://www.info.kochi-tech.ac.jp/FLOPS2016/

FLOPS has been established to promote cooperation between logic and functional programmers, hence the name. This year we have taken the name exceptionally seriously, to cover the whole extent of declarative programming, which also includes program transformation, re-writing, and extracting programs from proofs of their correctness. There is another strong emphasis: on cross-fertilization among people developing theory, writing tools and language systems using that theory, and the users of these tools. We specifically ask the authors to make their papers understandable by the wide audience of declarative programmers and researchers.

As you can see from the Program Committee list, the members have done first-rate theoretic work, and are also known for their languages, tools and libraries. PC will appreciate the good practical work. Incidentally, there is a special category, ``System Descriptions'' that FLOPS has always been known for. We really want to have more submissions in that category.

One can see even on LtU that there is some rift between theoreticians and practitioners: Sean McDermid messages come to mind. He does have many good points. We really hope that FLOPS will help repair this rift.

Recent LtU discussions have mentioned (eg. here) that it is hard to get programming language "design work" to get recognized academically. Good design work that is *also* accompanied by solid benchmarks or strong correctness argument will get recognized for the benchmarks or formal guarantees, but design work on domains that do not lend themselves to easy performance metrics, or done by people that do not use formalization as a validation tool will be hard to get recognized. A recent blog post by Jonathan Edwards echoes the same frustration (note that it also complains about the worse-is-better philosophy prevalent in industry not being good at fostering radical changes either).

(I would like to apologize to the part of the LtU community that does not care about academia. I try to keep my usual submissions/topics independent of professional occupation, and this one is the exception. Feel free to just skip it.)

There are some academic spaces where design work can stand of its own. I know of the Future of Programming workshop, the Onward! conference, and maybe (it's probably too soon to tell) the new SNAPL conference. However, at least the first two events are considered somewhat second-class in the academic community (which has an unfortunate tendancy to foster competitivity through metrics and will keep core of "top tier" conferences, creating strong incentives to publish only at the most selective/established places). ICFP has a "functional pearl" category (see Call For Papers (CFP), section "Special categories of papers") that counts as a first-class ICFP publication, ITP has a "rough diamond" category (CFP, but-last paragraph), Oleg just mentioned FLOPS "system descriptions" (it also has "declarative pearls", CFP, "Scope"), what would a category of "design papers" look like? (Yes, the idea is have a niche to protect endangered species that the free market would tend to root out; I think we can win big by dedicating a reasonable proportion of our scarce resources to fostering intellectual and methodological diversity.)

Here is a proposal for how it would be defined, or rather, how it would be reviewed (which I think is the subtle question):

Each proposed language/feature design must come with a working implementation. The author should highlight the proper domain area in the submission, and maybe make a few suggestion of potential programs to implement. Reviewers are then asked to actually implement some programs using this language/feature, and rate the system based on whether they enjoyed this implementation attempt.

(I don't know where such a category would fit; PLDI has a D for "Design" in the name, but then I don't know much about this conference.)