CACM (was Re: Reasons why you don't prove your programs are correct) - comp.software-eng

Message from discussion CACM (was Re: Reasons why you don't prove your programs are correct)

Frank A. Adrian

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More options Jan 22 1990, 10:27 am

Newsgroups: comp.software-eng, comp.misc

From: fra...@mentor.com (Frank A. Adrian)

Date: 22 Jan 90 15:27:17 GMT

Local: Mon, Jan 22 1990 10:27 am

Subject: CACM (was Re: Reasons why you don't prove your programs are correct)

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In article <16...@duke.cs.duke.edu> c...@romeo.UUCP (Charlie Martin) writes:
>But, in fact, these issues had been examined at some length in the
>formal methods community. Had Dr Fetzer been conversant with the
>literature, he would have known it; had the reviewers been
>appropriately chosen, they would have called him on it. The fact that
>Dr Fetzer's article was published without appropriate examination of
>the literature is failure on the part of CACM which I think is very
>hard to excuse.

Well, I don't excuse it. Has anyone noticed the dumbing down of CACM in
order to try to get a broader membership? Long gone are the days when
you could find mainly articles like "On the Probability Distribution of
the Values of Binary Trees", "Application of Game Tree Searching Techniques
to Sequential Pattern Recognition", and "Complex Interval Arithmetic" (these
titles taken from random from CACM, Vol. 14, No. 2, Feb. '71 - and, BTW, the
sixties issues were even better).

Instead we get whole issues devoted to "Computers and Society", which although
an important subject, is not one which can be very usefully applied to most
Comp. Sci. professionals (although we build the tools, we often have little
say in usage policy). The inclusion of more "practicum" articles rather than
research is another sign of decline. And the final nail in the coffin
has been the recent inclusion of a Personal Computing column. Any "technical"
magazine which allows one of these rotten apples into its pages has never stayed
"technical" long. I don't know if it's because the editorial policy has
shifted before the column appears or if it's just some sort of karmic influence.
However, I still believe that before long we will be seeing articles on "How I
Used Lotus 1-2-3 to do a Least-Squares Analysis" or others of its ilk (after
all, we do have to increase membership, eh?).

All in all, I wish that I could drop the $30 charge for CACM and keep my
membership for Computing Surveys, ToPLAS, SIGArch, SIGPLAN, etc. However,
ACM will not allow me to do this. It is becoming more and more obvious to
me that CACM is becoming more of an embarrassment than a flagship publication.
Maybe it's just that I'm grumpy today. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I
just getting continually more grouchy as the years go along?
--

Frank A. Adrian
Mentor Graphics, Inc.
fra...@mntgfx.com

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