To: the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the ones who see things differently Subject: you should write an Onward! paper https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1708

A lovely blog post! I can't help noting the large steering committee seems all-male though.

@jonathoda But the rules of academic conferences still apply, right? Authors are required to participate in SPLASH 2024, and thus pay (so far unknown) registration fees, and maybe have to travel to Pasadena as well if there is no hybrid option.

Good question. Traditionally the answer was yes, but that broke down with remote during covid. I’m going to ask the steering committee.

My employer has a no-fly policy, so I wouldn't be able to attend in-person even if the gender exclusivity was addressed.

I’m told there will be some form of remote participation this year but the details are TBD

@jonathoda Do you have a comment on the gender issue?

That is out of my control, and it is just the Steering Committee. My proposed Program Committee has been approved by SIGPLAN to meet their Diversity Policy .

Fair enough, thanks for sharing the diversity policy

Is there any good community to discuss your first attempts of writing a paper. I'd love to do this, but I've no idea how to start.

A proven method is the writers’ workshop. You could try to gather a group here.

I've had a whole one paper published but I didn't think the peer review was strict enough, so overall I'm not a good teacher, but I would also like to be a student on this topic

The sweet spot is about 5-6 authors in a writers’ workshop. Maybe I’ll try to put that together.

I'd love to be involved in this writers workshop please. I'm also trying to write more to share my ideas, but have little experience

@Alex McLean @Duncan Cragg Following up: we will have a remote participation option for accepted authors at Onward!. Details to be determined.

Submission done! Is anyone else here planning to submit an essay? If you are struggling with the deadline, there's good news: whereas the Web site says "Thursday 25th", the submission site actually says "Friday Apr 26, 2024, 115959 AM UTC". That's a lot more precise, and comes from the bot actually handling submissions, so I'd say it's more trustworthy.

Ah yeah, the PL community often uses these “anywhere on earth / AoE” timezone deadlines. 48 hours left!

Welp, I’m also trying. Just one more complete rewrite… 😅

Don't forget the importance of breaks to get perspective and to re-energise, everyone..

Also remember Onward! has two phases, so you get a shot at responding to reviewer criticisms

@Lu Wilson’s submission (with Dave Ackley) looks very promising, judging from the teaser: https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/academia/natural-code/submitted/

thanks! to be clear, we submitted to onward essays, not onward papers, but onward nonetheless! and we shall see what happens, which could be anything

@Lu Wilson I am rather confident about what will happen next: we will all get good feedback on our submissions.

I’m looking for some sort of kickback, since my agitation for paper submissions seems to have gotten channeled into essays

As a reader subjected only to the result and not involved in the process, I find Acknowledgements sections in papers always a little out of place and uninteresting and often skip reading them, but dang has this essay writing process opened my eyes to why these sections exist. I am incredibly grateful for everyone who takes the time to seriously make an effort to understand an author’s crude early attempt to express themselves and then write detailed feedback to help them do it better.