Onward! EssaysSPLASH 2020
Onward! Essays is looking for clear and compelling pieces of writing about topics important to the software community. An essay can be long or short.
An essay can be an exploration of the topic and its impact, or a story about the circumstances of its creation; it can present a personal view of what is, explore a terrain, or lead the reader in an act of discovery; it can be a philosophical digression or a deep analysis. It can describe a personal journey, perhaps the one the author took to reach an understanding of the topic. The subject area—software, programming, and programming languages—should be interpreted broadly and can include the relationship of software to human endeavors, or its philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or anthropological underpinnings.
Onward! Essays invites not only experienced academics but graduate students to submit essays with constructive criticism of current software development technology and practices, as well as presentations of ideas that could change the realm of software development. Practitioners who are dissatisfied—or satisfied!—with the state of our art are also encouraged to share insights about how to reform—or improve—software development, perhaps by presenting detailed examples of a new approach, demonstrating concrete benefits and potential risks.
Onward! Essays is not looking for research-as-usual papers—an essay doesn’t contain definitive validation; however, regardless of its form or topic, the essay must have “substance.” An essay may or may not have a conclusion, but it must provide some insight or compelling argument, either directly or indirectly stated; the reader should be left—perhaps after some reflection—in no doubt about the claimed insight or argument. The key characteristic of a successful essay is that it shows a keen mind coming to grips with a tough or intriguing problem in such a way that, as Virginia Woolf wrote, “it explains much and tells much.”
Long essays are fine, but essayists are encouraged to consider the virtues of short essays that deliver their points sharply and with precision. Essays as short as a single page are welcome at Onward! Essays. Short essays will be accorded the same status at Onward! Essays as longer ones.
Accepted Essays
Call for Essays
Selection Process
Onward! essays are peer-reviewed in a single-blind manner. Accepted essays will appear in the Onward! Proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. Submissions will be judged on the potential impact of the ideas and the quality of the presentation.
The Onward! Essays track follows a two-phase review process. This enables us to welcome contributions that contain promising material and have the potential to meet the conference’s standards, but which may fall short of this in their initial form. At the end of the first round, all essays will be either accepted normally, subject to major revisions, or rejected outright. The authors of essays in the second category will get around one month to complete the requested revisions, at which point the original reviewers will decide on final acceptance or rejection. As usual, essays in the first category will also receive feedback from the reviewers, and the corresponding authors will be required to take that feedback into account for the final submission.
In order to facilitate the second round of review, authors of essays in need of major revisions will be requested to accompany their second submission with a cover letter mapping the requested revisions to specific parts of the essay. The program committee will use the cover letter and the revised submission to arrive at a final decision.
The second phase will only be used to elevate promising work to the conference’s standard, not to require additional work on essays already deemed up-to-standard.
Instructions for Authors
Essays should use the ACM SIGPLAN Conference acmart
Format, with the sigplan
and review
\documentclass
options. This produces two-column, 10pt files. If you use LaTeX or Word, please use the provided ACM SIGPLAN acmart
templates provided here. All submissions should be in PDF format. Please also ensure that your submission is legible when printed on a black and white printer. In particular, please check that colors remain distinct and font sizes are legible.
The following list describes the typical expectations for a submission. However, given the nature of the Onward! Essays track, we understand that authors of certain submissions might have special requirements. For example, if a contribution might require a different media (video, interactive presentation or an art piece). If that is the case for your submission or if you have any other concerns, please contact the PC chair (or, if you prefer, a different PC member) to discuss the issue.
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All submitted essays should conform to the formatting instructions unless there is a reason founded in the nature of the essay to do otherwise; in this case, please preface the essay with the reasons for the variation.
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Essays must describe unpublished work that is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere as described by SIGPLAN’s Republication Policy. Submitters should also be aware of ACM’s Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism.
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There is no limit on the length of submissions, but note that reviewers will not be obligated to read beyond the end of their interest. The main part of the final version should not exceed 25 pages unless there are two program committee members who believe the content requires a longer essay, and the quality of the writing is likely to sustain readers. If otherwise your final version is longer than those 25 pages, you must re-submit it before the final deadline so the program committee can reëxamine it. No limit is imposed on the bibliographic section or other appendices.
Submission Site
To submit a paper, please use the Onward! Essays 2020 submissions page.
Tue 17 NovDisplayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change
00:20 - 01:00 | |||
00:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
02:20 - 03:00 | |||
02:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
04:20 - 05:00 | |||
04:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
06:20 - 07:00 | |||
06:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
07:00 - 08:20 | |||
07:00 80mKeynote | Testing Deep Neural Networks Keynotes Mary Lou Soffa University of Virginia Link to publication |
08:20 - 09:00 | |||
08:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
09:00 - 10:20 | |||
09:00 20mTalk | Example-Based Live Programming for Everyone: Building Language-agnostic Tools for Live Programming with LSP and GraalVM Onward! Papers Fabio Niephaus Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Patrick Rein Hasso Plattner Institute, Jakob Edding Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Jonas Hering Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Bastian König Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Kolya Opahle Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Nico Scordialo Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Robert Hirschfeld Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), University of Potsdam, Germany Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
09:20 20mTalk | End-User Software Customization by Direct Manipulation of Tabular Data Onward! Papers Link to publication Pre-print | ||
09:40 20mTalk | Discussion of Aviation Software Oversight Improvement Onward! Essays Marc Ronell U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Link to publication DOI | ||
10:00 20mTalk | A Case Study in Language-Based Security: Building an I/O Library for Wyvern Onward! Papers Jennifer Fish Carnegie Mellon University, Darya Melicher Google, Jonathan Aldrich Carnegie Mellon University Link to publication |
10:20 - 11:00 | |||
10:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
11:00 - 12:20 | T-3-OnwardOnward! Essays / Onward! Papers at SPLASH-III +12h Chair(s): William Cook University of Texas at Austin, Stephen Kell University of Kent | ||
11:00 20mTalk | How (Not) to Write Java Pointer Analyses after 2020 Onward! Essays Manas Thakur IIT Mandi Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
11:20 20mTalk | The Wonderful Wizard of LoC: Paying Attention to the Man behind the Curtain of Lines-of-Code Metrics Onward! Essays Kalev Alpernas Tel Aviv University, Yotam M. Y. Feldman Tel Aviv University, Hila Peleg University of California at San Diego Link to publication DOI | ||
11:40 20mTalk | Putting the Semantics into Semantic Versioning Onward! Essays Patrick Lam University of Waterloo, Jens Dietrich Victoria University of Wellington, David J. Pearce Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
12:00 20mTalk | Demystifying Dependence Onward! Papers Link to publication |
12:20 - 13:00 | Breakfast in WellingtonStudent Research Competition at SPLASH-I +12h
| ||
12:20 40mPoster | Student Research Competition Student Research Competition |
13:00 - 14:00 | T-4-OnwardOnward! Papers / Onward! Essays at SPLASH-III +12h Chair(s): Marc Ronell U.S. Federal Aviation Administration | ||
13:00 20mTalk | Notes on Notebooks: Is Jupyter the Bringer of Jollity? Onward! Essays Jeremy Singer Glasgow University Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
13:20 20mTalk | Intrepydd: Performance, Productivity and Portability for Data Science Application Kernels Onward! Papers Tong Zhou Georgia Institute of Technology, Jun Shirako Georgia Institute of Technology, Anirudh Jain Georgia Institute of Technology, Sriseshan Srikanth Georgia Institute of Technology, Thomas Conte Georgia Institute of Technology, Richard Vuduc Georgia Tech, Vivek Sarkar Georgia Institute of Technology Link to publication | ||
13:40 20mTalk | A principled approach to REPL interpreters Onward! Papers L. Thomas van Binsbergen CWI, Mauricio Verano Merino Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Pierre Jeanjean Inria, Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA, Tijs van der Storm CWI & University of Groningen, Netherlands, Benoit Combemale University of Rennes, France / Inria, France / CNRS, France / IRISA, France, Olivier Barais University of Rennes, France / Inria, France / CNRS, France / IRISA, France Link to publication DOI Pre-print |
14:20 - 15:00 | |||
14:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
15:00 - 16:00 | T-5-OnwardOnward! Essays / Onward! Papers at SPLASH-III +12h Chair(s): Stephen Kell University of Kent | ||
15:00 20mTalk | Natural Language Theory Meets Programming Language Theory: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Programming Language Evaluation Onward! Essays | ||
15:20 20mTalk | Software Design as Story Telling: Reflecting on the Work of Italo Calvino Onward! Essays Paolo Ciancarini University of Bologna / Innopolis University, Sergey Masyagin Innopolis University, Russia, Giancarlo Succi Innopolis University Link to publication DOI | ||
15:40 20mTalk | Analogy-Making as a Core Primitive in the Software Engineering Toolbox Onward! Papers Link to publication Pre-print Media Attached |
16:20 - 17:00 | |||
16:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
18:20 - 19:00 | |||
18:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
19:00 - 20:20 | |||
19:00 80mKeynote | Testing Deep Neural Networks Keynotes Mary Lou Soffa University of Virginia Link to publication |
20:20 - 21:00 | |||
20:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
21:00 - 22:20 | |||
21:00 20mTalk | Example-Based Live Programming for Everyone: Building Language-agnostic Tools for Live Programming with LSP and GraalVM Onward! Papers Fabio Niephaus Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Patrick Rein Hasso Plattner Institute, Jakob Edding Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Jonas Hering Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Bastian König Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Kolya Opahle Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Nico Scordialo Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Robert Hirschfeld Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), University of Potsdam, Germany Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
21:20 20mTalk | End-User Software Customization by Direct Manipulation of Tabular Data Onward! Papers Link to publication Pre-print | ||
21:40 20mTalk | Discussion of Aviation Software Oversight Improvement Onward! Essays Marc Ronell U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Link to publication DOI | ||
22:00 20mTalk | A Case Study in Language-Based Security: Building an I/O Library for Wyvern Onward! Papers Jennifer Fish Carnegie Mellon University, Darya Melicher Google, Jonathan Aldrich Carnegie Mellon University Link to publication |
22:20 - 23:00 | |||
22:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
23:00 - 00:20 | T-3-OnwardOnward! Papers / Onward! Essays at SPLASH-III Chair(s): Crista Lopes University of California, Irvine | ||
23:00 20mTalk | How (Not) to Write Java Pointer Analyses after 2020 Onward! Essays Manas Thakur IIT Mandi Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
23:20 20mTalk | The Wonderful Wizard of LoC: Paying Attention to the Man behind the Curtain of Lines-of-Code Metrics Onward! Essays Kalev Alpernas Tel Aviv University, Yotam M. Y. Feldman Tel Aviv University, Hila Peleg University of California at San Diego Link to publication DOI | ||
23:40 20mTalk | Putting the Semantics into Semantic Versioning Onward! Essays Patrick Lam University of Waterloo, Jens Dietrich Victoria University of Wellington, David J. Pearce Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
00:00 20mTalk | Demystifying Dependence Onward! Papers Link to publication |
Wed 18 NovDisplayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change
00:20 - 01:00 | Breakfast in ParisStudent Research Competition at SPLASH-I
| ||
00:20 40mPoster | Student Research Competition Student Research Competition |
01:00 - 02:00 | |||
01:00 20mTalk | Notes on Notebooks: Is Jupyter the Bringer of Jollity? Onward! Essays Jeremy Singer Glasgow University Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
01:20 20mTalk | Intrepydd: Performance, Productivity and Portability for Data Science Application Kernels Onward! Papers Tong Zhou Georgia Institute of Technology, Jun Shirako Georgia Institute of Technology, Anirudh Jain Georgia Institute of Technology, Sriseshan Srikanth Georgia Institute of Technology, Thomas Conte Georgia Institute of Technology, Richard Vuduc Georgia Tech, Vivek Sarkar Georgia Institute of Technology Link to publication | ||
01:40 20mTalk | A principled approach to REPL interpreters Onward! Papers L. Thomas van Binsbergen CWI, Mauricio Verano Merino Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Pierre Jeanjean Inria, Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA, Tijs van der Storm CWI & University of Groningen, Netherlands, Benoit Combemale University of Rennes, France / Inria, France / CNRS, France / IRISA, France, Olivier Barais University of Rennes, France / Inria, France / CNRS, France / IRISA, France Link to publication DOI Pre-print |
02:20 - 03:00 | |||
02:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
03:00 - 04:00 | |||
03:00 20mTalk | Natural Language Theory Meets Programming Language Theory: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Programming Language Evaluation Onward! Essays | ||
03:20 20mTalk | Software Design as Story Telling: Reflecting on the Work of Italo Calvino Onward! Essays Paolo Ciancarini University of Bologna / Innopolis University, Sergey Masyagin Innopolis University, Russia, Giancarlo Succi Innopolis University Link to publication DOI | ||
03:40 20mTalk | Analogy-Making as a Core Primitive in the Software Engineering Toolbox Onward! Papers Link to publication Pre-print Media Attached |
04:20 - 05:00 | |||
04:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
06:20 - 07:00 | |||
06:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
08:20 - 09:00 | |||
08:20 40mOther | Awards Session Awards |
09:00 - 10:20 | |||
09:00 80mKeynote | Models and Programs: Better Togethersupported by Futurewei Keynotes Sriram Rajamani Microsoft Research Link to publication |
10:20 - 11:00 | |||
10:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
12:20 - 13:00 | |||
12:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
14:20 - 15:00 | |||
14:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
16:20 - 17:00 | |||
16:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
18:20 - 19:00 | |||
18:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
20:20 - 21:00 | |||
20:20 40mOther | Awards Session Awards |
21:00 - 22:20 | |||
21:00 80mKeynote | Models and Programs: Better Togethersupported by Futurewei Keynotes Sriram Rajamani Microsoft Research Link to publication |
22:20 - 23:00 | |||
22:20 40mSocial Event | Meet The Speakers Meet The Speakers (MTS) |
Not scheduled yet
Not scheduled yet Talk | A Rhetorical Framework for Programming Language Evaluation Onward! Essays Link to publication DOI |