ECOOP is Europe’s longest-standing annual Programming Languages (PL) conference, and welcomes high quality research papers relating to the PL field in a broad sense.

This year the conference will feature dedicated paper categories for reproduction studies, experience reports, reflective “pearls”, and forward-thinking “new idea” papers.

We are also pleased to have two Journal First routes for submission to ECOOP, with the ACM TOPLAS and Science of Computer Programming journals.

What’s with the OO?
The OO in ECOOP has traditionally stood for “object-oriented”. These days, while the conference absolutely welcomes papers that relate to OO, the scope of ECOOP is much broader and encompasses the Programming Languages field as a whole. Think of the conference as being called “ECOOP: the European COnference On Programming languages”.

ECOOP 2019: Call for Papers
View track page for all details
ECOOP 2019 solicits high-quality submissions describing original and unpublished results on any Programming Languages topic.

On submission, authors will be asked to identify their paper with one of the following categories, details of which are given below:

Research Paper
Tool Insights Paper
Reproduction Study
Experience Report
Pearl
Brave New Idea
The Program Committee and External Review Committee will evaluate the contribution of each submission in the context of the paper category, as well as its general relevance and accessibility to a PL audience. All papers will be evaluated with reference to:

Significance. The results in the paper must have the potential to add to the state of the art, practice, or understanding of the field in significant ways.

Evidence. The paper must present evidence supporting its claims. Examples of evidence include formalizations and proofs, implemented systems, experimental results, statistical analyses, and case studies.

Clarity. The paper must present its contributions and results clearly.

Papers co-authored by members of the Program Committee will be reviewed solely by members of the External Review Committee and selected experts from outside the Program Committee.

Paper Categories
All accepted papers, regardless of category, will be published in the ECOOP’19 formal proceedings.

Research Papers

The Research Papers category is the most traditional paper category, and solicits high quality research papers that demonstrate advances in the PL field.

As an alternative to being published in the conference proceedings, authors may wish to submit research papers to be considered for publication in ACM TOPLAS or Science of Computer Programming; see “Journal First” below for more details.

Tool Insights Papers

We welcome submissions in this category that focus on the practical details of the design and implementation of PL tools – details that are often omitted from regular research papers due to space constraints, despite being fascinating and worthy of communication. A strong Tool Insights paper should communicate engineering experience and insights that are likely to be useful to other members of the PL community who may face similar problems in future. Examples of issues that Tool Insights papers might focus on include, but are not limited to: performance, reliability, portability, inter-tool integration, infrastructure re-use, evaluation issues, theory/practice gaps, precision/efficiency and soundness/efficiency trade-offs.

Reproduction Studies

Common in other sciences, reproduction means independently reconstructing an experiment in a different context (e.g., virtual machine, platform, class of applications) in order to validate or refute important results of earlier work. A good reproduction study will include thorough empirical evaluation. It will contain a detailed comparison with the previous results, seeking reasons for possible disagreements. A thoroughly-conducted reproduction study that perfectly replicates an existing experiment and reaches the same conclusions will be regarded as significant, so long as said experiment is significant enough to be worthy of reproduction.

Experience Reports

The Experience Reports category solicits articles focussing on noteworthy applications of known PL techniques, tools and ideas in interesting domains and by other communities. Examples include, but are not limited to, applications of PL techniques in industry, open source, education, and other academic disciplines. We welcome both reports on successful applications of PL ideas, as well as reports that shed light on limitations and problems that may provide inspiration for future research.

Pearls

The Pearl category solicits articles that explain a known idea in a new and elegant way, to the benefit of the PL community. A Pearl may well be shorter than a regular research paper, but there is no hard requirement on this.

Brave New Ideas

The Brave New Idea paper category solicits forward-looking articles on ideas in the field of Programming Languages that may take some time to substantiate, but for which early communication to the community is likely to be of benefit. For this category we welcome papers that are particularly conceptually novel or unconventional, and that as a result may be harder to back up by traditional evaluation methods. A Brave New Idea paper may well be shorter than a regular research paper, but there is no requirement for it to be so.

Paper Submission
See the Journal First section below for alternative journal submission options

Only papers that have not been published and are not under review for publication elsewhere can be submitted. Double submissions will be rejected without review. If major parts of an ECOOP submission have appeared elsewhere in any form, authors are required to notify the ECOOP program chair and to explain the overlap and relationship. Authors are also required to inform the program chair about closely related work submitted to another conference while the ECOOP submission is under review.

ECOOP Proceedings are published by Dagstuhl LIPIcs. Papers must be written in English and follow the Dagstuhl LIPIcs LaTeX-style template. Authors retain ownership of their content.

Papers must be no longer than 25 pages, excluding references and appendices (see below for detailed information about appendices). This limit applies to all paper categories. However, papers should be as long as necessary, and not longer: authors will not be penalized for a paper being shorter than the page limit so long as their paper otherwise meets the expectations of ECOOP.

Submissions will be carried out electronically via HotCRP.

At least one author of every accepted paper must register for ECOOP 2019 and present their paper.

Anonymity
Reviewing for ECOOP will initially be double-blind: the identity of reviewers will be anonymous as standard, and authors’ identities will be withheld until a reviewer submits her/his review. Reviewing becomes single-blind at the point of review submission: the identity of a given paper’s authors will become known to a reviewer when the reviewer submits his/her review for that paper.

To facilitate the initial double-blind phase, submitted papers must adhere to two rules:

Author names and institutions must be omitted

References to authors’ own other work should be in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”).

When in doubt, contact the Program Chair.

Additional Material
Clearly marked additional appendices, not intended for the final publication, containing supporting proofs, analyses, statistics, etc., may be included beyond the page limit. There is also an option on the paper submission page to submit supplementary material, e.g., a technical report including proofs, or web pages and repositories that cannot easily be anonymized. This material will be made available to reviewers after the initial reviews have been completed, when author names are revealed.

Reviewers are under no obligation to examine the appendices and supplementary material. Therefore, the paper must be a stand-alone document, with the appendices and supplementary material viewed only as a way of providing useful information that cannot fit in the page limit, rather than as a means to extend the page limit.

Authors of papers that have been submitted but not accepted by previous conferences may optionally submit a Note to Reviewers. The Note to Reviewers should a) identify the previous venue(s) (e.g., ESOP 2019, POPL 2019, OOPSLA 2018); b) list the major issues identified by the reviews at those venues; and c) describe the changes made to the paper in response to those reviews. These notes will be made available to reviewers after their initial reviews have been completed and author names have been revealed.

Response Period
Authors will be given a three-day period to read and respond to the reviews of their papers before the program committee meeting. Responses have no formal length limit, but concision will be highly appreciated and more concise responses are likely to be more effective.

Awards
The Program Chair will work with the Program Committee to select up to one paper in each category for recognition via a Distinguished Paper award. A Distinguished Artifact award will also be made.

Artifact Evaluation
To reward the creation of artifacts and support replication of experiments, authors of accepted papers (regardless of category) can submit artifacts, such as tools, data, models, or videos, to be evaluated by an Artifact Evaluation Committee. Artifacts that are accepted by the committee will be recognized officially.

Journal First
We have Journal First arrangements with two journals: ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, and Elsevier Science of Computer Programming.

Please contact the Program Chair if you have questions about the procedures and dates associated with the Journal First options.

Common to both routes

Only regular research papers (not papers in the other ECOOP 2019 categories) are eligible for the Journal First routes.

Only new papers are eligible for the Journal First routes to ECOOP 2019. That is, it is not acceptable to submit an extension of a previous conference paper, even if the associated journal solicits extended papers via its standard submission route.

Authors of all accepted Journal First papers will be invited to submit a short abstract for their paper to appear in the ECOOP 2019 conference proceedings.

Journal First papers will be included along with research papers submitted directly to the conference when a Distinguished Paper is selected.

Science of Computer Programming Route

See this dedicated web page for full details of how to submit to the ECOOP 2019 Science of Computer Programming special issue.

Submission deadline: Friday 16 November 2018

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Route

See this announcement for details of the TOPLAS scheme whereby papers submitted to TOPLAS can be presented at selected conferences.

Authors interested in this route should submit their paper to TOPLAS via its usual submission system, and mark their paper as an ECOOP 2019 submission. The ECOOP Program Chair will then be informed of this submission and will have some input into the review process.

Submission deadline: To allow the TOPLAS review process to complete in time for publication before ECOOP 2019, Journal First TOPLAS papers should be submitted no later than Monday 15 October 2018.

More Information
For additional information, please contact the ECOOP Program Chair, Alastair Donaldson.