PLATEAU 2012

4th Annual International Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools

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• Keynote speaker announced! (October 2012)
• Extensions available if you would like to submit, but missed the deadline. Contact Us. (August 2012)
• Call for papers out now. Submit here! (June 2012)
• PLATEAU 2012 is a confirmed workshop at SPLASH 2012. Call for papers will be going out next month (May 2012)

Main Themes and Goals

At the Programming Languages Grand Challenges panel at POPL 2009, Greg Morrisett claimed that one of the great neglected areas in programming languages research is the bridge between Programming Languages and Human-Computer Interaction: the evaluation of the usability of programming languages and tools. This is evident by the recent research programs of major languages conferences such as POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, and ECOOP. The object-oriented conferences tend to have at least one or two papers in the areas of corpus analysis or evaluation methodologies, but the authors of the papers seem to avoid using the results of their studies to make conclusions about the languages or tools themselves. Software engineering and human-computer interaction conferences tend to have better support of language usability analysis (CHI 2009 has three tracks that showcase research in this direction), but have limited visibility to the programming languages community.

This workshop aims to be a first step in filling that void by developing and stimulating discussion of usability and evaluation of programming languages and tools with respect to language design and related areas. We have two goals:

• Develop a research community that shares ideas and collaborates on research related to the evaluation and usability of languages and tools
• Encourage the languages and tools communities to think more critically about how usability affects language and tool design and adoption

Other Editions

Click here to find out more about previous editions.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Fourth Annual Workshop on
Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU)
in conjunction with SPLASH/Onward! 2012
October 21, 2012 (Tucson, AZ)

https://sites.google.com/site/workshopplateau/

Scope

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. We are also interested in the input of other members of the programming research community working on related areas, such as aspects, refactoring, design patterns, program analysis, program comprehension, software visualization, end-user programming, and other programming language paradigms. 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

Submissions will be through Easychair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=plateau2012

Papers should be 4-10 pages using the ACM SIGPLAN template with 10pt font (http://www.sigplan.org/authorInformation.htm). All accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• 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

Submissions will be through Easychair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=plateau2012

Papers should be 4-10 pages using the ACM SIGPLAN template with 10pt font (http://www.sigplan.org/authorInformation.htm). All accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

William Cook

Title: A Science of Programming Language Design? Confessions of a PL polytheist, with practical applications

Previous Workshops

PLATEAU 2011 (2011 Proceedings)
PLATEAU 2010 (2010 Proceedings)
PLATEAU 2009 (2009 Proceedings)

Previous Proceedings

PLATEAU 2012
PLATEAU 2011
PLATEAU 2010
PLATEAU 2009