2016-12-12 News: OBT accepted 10 presentations out of 16 submissions.

2016-11-10 News: The deadline for talk proposals has been extended to Tuesday 15th November.

2016-11-10 News: Moa Johanssen is confirmed as an invited speaker for OBT 2017.

2016-10-20 News: Lindsey Kuper has a blog post on ways to get funding to come to OBT.

Programming language researchers have the principles, tools, algorithms and abstractions to solve all kinds of problems, in all areas of computer science. However, identifying and evaluating new problems, particularly those that lie outside the typical core PL problems we all know and love, can be a significant challenge. This workshop’s goal is to identify and discuss problems that do not often show up in our top conferences, but where programming language research can make a substantial impact. We hope fora like this will increase the diversity of problems that are studied by PL researchers and thus increase our community’s impact on the world.

While many workshops associated with POPL have become more like mini-conferences themselves, this is an anti-goal for OBT. The workshop will be informal and structured to encourage discussion. We are at least as interested in problems as in solutions.

A good submission is one that outlines a new problem or an interesting, underrepresented problem domain. Good submissions may also remind the PL community of problems that were once in vogue but have not recently been seen in top PL conferences. Good submissions do not need to propose complete or even partial solutions, though there should be some reason to believe that programming languages researchers have the tools necessary to search for solutions in the area at hand. Submissions that seem likely to stimulate discussion about the direction of programming language research are encouraged.

Use your imagination. It’s hard to imagine how a talk proposal that discusses programming languages could be considered out of scope. If in doubt, ask the program chair.

2017 marks the sixth year of OBT and of co-location with POPL. The previous five workshops were: