The IBM 701 Speedcoding System
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I
Communications of the ACM
Preliminary report: international algebraic language
Communications of the ACM
Ur: statically-typed metaprogramming with type-level record computation
PLDI '10 Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
Java generics adoption: how new features are introduced, championed, or ignored
Proceedings of the 8th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Evaluation and usability of programming languages and tools
Quality in use of domain-specific languages: a case study
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Evaluation and usability of programming languages and tools
How can a DSL for expert end-users be designed for better usability?: a case study in computer music
CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Cognitive architectures: a way forward for the psychology of programming
Proceedings of the ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software
Socio-PLT: principles for programming language adoption
Proceedings of the ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software
Developing a new computer music programming language in the 'research through design' context
Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Systems, programming, and applications: software for humanity
A case study in evidence-based DSL evolution
ECMFA'13 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications
An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax
ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)
Adoption and use of Java generics
Empirical Software Engineering
Hi-index | 0.00 |
While still a relatively young field, computer science has a vast body of knowledge in the domain of programming languages. When a new language is introduced, its designers make claims which distinguish their language from previous languages. However, it often feels like language designers do not feel a pressing need to back these claims with evidence beyond personal anecdotes. Peer reviewers are likely to agree. In this paper, we present preliminary work which revisits the history of such claims by examining a number of language design papers which span the history of programming language development. We focus on the issue of claim-evidence correspondence, or determining how often claims are or are not backed by evidence. These preliminary results confirm that unsupported claims have been around since the inception of higher level programming in the 1950s. We stake a position that this behavior is unacceptable for the health of the research community. We should be more aware of valiant and effective efforts for supplying evidence to support language design claims.