PLATEAU 2014 - Call for Submissions

[Craig Anslow]

The Fifth Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU)

Co-located with ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity 

20/21 October 2014
Portland, Oregon, USA

http://2014.splashcon.org/track/plateau2014 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Theme

Programming languages exist to enable programmers to develop software effectively. But how efficiently programmers can write software depends on the usability of the languages and tools that they develop with. The aim of this workshop is to discuss methods, metrics and techniques for evaluating the usability of languages and language tools. The supposed benefits of such languages and tools cover a large space, including making programs easier to read, write, and maintain; allowing programmers to write more flexible and powerful programs; and restricting programs to make them more safe and secure.

PLATEAU gathers the intersection of researchers in the programming language, programming tool, and human-computer interaction communities to share their research and discuss the future of evaluation and usability of programming languages and tools.

Some particular areas of interest are:

• empirical studies of programming languages
• methodologies and philosophies behind language and tool evaluation
• software design metrics and their relations to the underlying language
• user studies of language features and software engineering tools
• visual techniques for understanding programming languages
• critical comparisons of programming paradigms
• tools to support evaluating programming languages
• psychology of programming

Submission Details

PLATEAU encourages submissions of three types of papers:

Research and position papers: We encourage papers that describe work-in-progress or recently completed work based on the themes and goals of the workshop or related topics, report on experiences gained, question accepted wisdom, raise challenging open problems, or propose speculative new approaches. We will accept two types of papers: research papers up to 8 pages in length; and position papers up to 2 pages in length.

Hypotheses papers: Hypotheses papers explicitly identify beliefs of the research community or software industry about how a programming language, programming language feature, or programming language tool affects programming practice. Hypotheses can be collected from mailing lists, blog posts, paper introductions, developer forums, or interviews. Papers should clearly document the source(s) of each hypothesis and discuss the importance, use, and relevance of the hypotheses on research or practice. Papers may also, but are not required to, review evidence for or against the hypotheses identified. Hypotheses papers can be up to 4 pages in length.

Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library at the authors’ discretion.

Important Dates

Workshop paper submission due – August 1, 2014
Notification to authors – August 22, 2014
Early registration deadline – September 19, 2014

Keynote

Josh Bloch, former Chief Java Architect at Google and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

Workshop Organizers

Thomas LaToza, University of California, Irvine
Joshua Sunshine, Carnegie Mellon University
Craig Anslow, University of Calgary

Program Committee

Jennifer Baldwin, University of Victoria 
Andrew Begel, Microsoft Research
Andrew Black, Portland State University
Alan Blackwell, University of Cambridge
Jeffrey Carver, University of Alabama
Sebastian Erdweg, Technical University of Darmstadt
Thomas Fritz, University of Zurich
Stefan Hanenberg, University of Duisburg-Essen
Matthias Hauswirth, University of Lugano
Ciera Jaspan, Google Leo Meyerovich, Graphistry
Gail Murphy, University of British Columbia
Emerson Murphy-Hill, North Carolina State University
James Noble, Victoria University of Wellington
Chris Parnin, North Carolina State University
Janet Siegmund, University of Passau
Andreas Stefik, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Chris Scaffidi, Oregon State University
Éric Tanter, University of Chile