Take a break: write an essay for Onward! essays

Take a break: write an essay for Onward! essays

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Friends

Writing papers is fun, but we mostly only get to write one *kind* of paper.  Here is an opportunity to write something in a totally different style:

        Submit an essay to Onward! Essays
        Deadline: 20 April 2009
        http://onward-conference.org/calls/foressays

An Onward! essay is a thoughtful reflection upon software-related technology. Its goal is to help the reader to share a new insight, engage with an argument, or wrestle with a dilemma.

A successful essay is a clear and compelling piece of writing that explores a topic important to the software community. The subject area should be interpreted broadly, including the relationship of software to human endeavours, or its philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or anthropological underpinnings. An essay can be an exploration of its topic, its impact, or 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 that by which the author reached an understanding of such a topic.

I'm the program chair, and I'd love to get submissions from the programming languages and theorem-proving community.  Reflections on programming, types, testing, verification, software engineering, compilers, society, ... you name it.  Anything to do with software.  NB: Onward! is co-located with OOPSLA, but they are otherwise unrelated.  OO is fine, but not required.

Don't forget: 20th April.

Simon


PS: To get your imagination going, here are a couple of (strongly-contrasting) past essays:
  * Dan Grossman "The transactional memory / garbage collection analogy"
        http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/djg/papers/analogy_oopsla07.pdf
  * Dick Gabriel "Designed as designer"
        http://dreamsongs.org/DesignedAsDesigner.html