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2013 Proceeding- General Chairs:
- Anthony Hosking,
- Patrick Eugster,
- Program Chair:
- Robert Hirschfeld
- Sponsor:
- sigplan
It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 12th edition of Onward!, the ACM Symposium on New Ideas in Programming and Reflections on Software.
Onward! focuses on everything to do with programming and software: including processes, methods, languages, communities, and applications. Onward! is more radical, more visionary, and more open than other conferences to not yet well-proven but well-argued ideas. Onward! welcomes different ways of thinking about, approaching, and reporting on programming language and software engineering research.
Onward! is looking for grand visions and new paradigms that could make a big difference in how we will build software in the future. But Onward! is not looking for research-as-usual papers --- conferences like OOPSLA are the place for that. Those conferences require rigorous validation such as theorems or empirical experiments, which are necessary for scientific progress, but which typically preclude discussion of early-stage ideas. Onward! papers must also supply some degree of validation because mere speculation is not a good basis for progress. For this Onward! accepts compelling arguments, exploratory implementations, and substantial examples. The use of mworked-out examples to support new ideas is strongly encouraged.
Onward! is reaching out not only to experienced academics but also to graduate students for constructive criticism of current software development technology and practices, and to present ideas that could change the realm of software development. Practitioners who are dissatisfied with the state of our art are also encouraged to share insights about how to reform software development, perhaps by presenting detailed examples of as new approach, and demonstrating concrete benefits and potential risks.
This year we accepted 11 out of 27 research papers and two out of four essays by following a twophase process. This process was different from the one of previous years in that it made explicit the opportunity for shepherding of submissions. Shepherding allows the program committee to offer help to the authors of papers deemed potentially acceptable by requesting them to improve specific aspects of the papers in keeping with the assessment criteria and the nature of Onward!. For example, the following represent some core improvement suggestions: Clarity of presentation and overall writing improvements to make the work more accessible, making the presentation of the technical ideas crisper or more concrete, making the argument sharper and more compelling, or expanding or refining the ideas based on new input from the reviewers. Authors were given about two months to perform revisions, after which a second submission occurred. Three of the research papers and two of the essays were subjected to shepherding. All of them reflected the revision requests of the program committee and so were accepted.
Our keynote speaker Gilad Bracha is known for his work on Newspeak, a highly dynamic and reflective object-oriented programming language designed to support explicitly modularity and security. His talk examines the past, present and future of radical innovation in programming mlanguages.
Proceeding Downloads
Usable security as a static-analysis problem: modeling and reasoning about user permissions in social-sharing systems
The privacy policies of many websites, especially those designed for sharing data, are a product of many inputs. They are defined by the program underlying the website, by user configurations (such as privacy settings), and by the interactions that ...
Model-based, event-driven programming paradigm for interactive web applications
Applications are increasingly distributed and event-driven. Advances in web frameworks have made it easier to program standalone servers and their clients, but these applications remain hard to write. A model-based programming paradigm is proposed that ...
What's wrong with git?: a conceptual design analysis
It is commonly asserted that the success of a software development project, and the usability of the final product, depend on the quality of the concepts that underlie its design. Yet this hypothesis has not been systematically explored by researchers, ...
Usable live programming
Programming today involves code editing mixed with bouts of debugging to get feedback on code execution. For programming to be more fluid, editing and debugging should occur concurrently as live programming. This paper describes how live execution ...
Conversational programming: exploring interactive program analysis
Our powerful computers help very little in debugging the program we have so we can change it into the program we want. We introduce Conversational Programming as a way to harness our computing power to inspect program meaning through a combination of ...
Game programming by demonstration
The increasing adoption of smartphones and tablets has provided tens of millions of users with substantial resources for computation, communication and sensing. The availability of these resources has a huge potential to positively transform our society ...
User model and system model: the yin and yang in user-centered software development
Software systems can be viewed from both external and internal perspectives. They are called user model and system model respectively in the human-computer interaction community. In this paper, we employ the yin-yang principle as an analytical tool for ...
The power of interoperability: why objects are inevitable
Three years ago in this venue, Cook argued that in their essence, objects are what Reynolds called procedural data structures. His observation raises a natural question: if procedural data structures are the essence of objects, has this contributed to ...
KScript and KSWorld: a time-aware and mostly declarative language and interactive GUI framework
We report on a language called KScript and a GUI framework called KSWorld. The goal of KScript and KSWorld is to try to reduce the accidental complexity in GUI framework code and application building. We aim for an understandable, concise way to specify ...
Growing solver-aided languages with rosette
SAT and SMT solvers have automated a spectrum of programming tasks, including program synthesis, code checking, bug localization, program repair, and programming with oracles. In principle, we obtain all these benefits by translating the program (once) ...
Building connections between theories of computing and physical systems
The theory and semantics of programming languages are typically formulated using abstract mathematical models that have no obvious connection to any physical theory. While this approach has a number of advantages, it does not generalize to complex non...
Content over container: object-oriented programming with multiplicities
In object-oriented programs, the relationship of an object to many objects is usually implemented using a collection. This is in contrast to a relationship to one object, which is usually realized as a direct value. However, using collections for ...
One VM to rule them all
- Thomas Würthinger,
- Christian Wimmer,
- Andreas Wöß,
- Lukas Stadler,
- Gilles Duboscq,
- Christian Humer,
- Gregor Richards,
- Doug Simon,
- Mario Wolczko
Building high-performance virtual machines is a complex and expensive undertaking; many popular languages still have low-performance implementations. We describe a new approach to virtual machine (VM) construction that amortizes much of the effort in ...
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Acceptance Rates
| Year | Submitted | Accepted | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onward! 2014 | 35 | 16 | 46% |
| Onward! 2013 | 27 | 11 | 41% |
| Onward! 2012 | 43 | 13 | 30% |
| Overall | 105 | 40 | 38% |