Yannis Smaragdakis

Yannis Smaragdakis

The dream of programming language design is to bring about orders-of-magnitude productivity improvements in software development tasks. Designers can endlessly debate on how this dream can be realized and on how close we are to its realization. Instead, I would like to focus on a question with an answer that can be, surprisingly, clearer: what will be the common principles behind next-paradigm, high-productivity programming languages, and how will they change everyday program development? Based on my decade-plus experience of heavy-duty development in declarative languages, I speculate that certain tenets of high-productivity languages are inevitable. These include, for instance, enormous variations in performance (including automatic transformations that change the asymptotic complexity of algorithms); a radical change in a programmer's workflow, elevating testing from a near-menial task to an act of deep understanding; a change in the need for formal proofs; and more.

Claire Le Goues, Yuriy Brun, Sven Apel et al.

Double-blind review relies on the authors' ability and willingness to effectively anonymize their submissions. We explore anonymization effectiveness at ASE 2016, OOPSLA 2016, and PLDI 2016 by asking reviewers if they can guess author identities. We find that 74%-90% of reviews contain no correct guess and that reviewers who self-identify as experts on a paper's topic are more likely to attempt to guess, but no more likely to guess correctly. We present our findings, summarize the PC chairs' comments about administering double-blind review, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of revealing author identities part of the way through the process, and conclude by advocating for the continued use of double-blind review.