Technical PapersECOOP 2024

ECOOP is Europe’s longest-standing annual Programming Languages conference, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and students to share their ideas and experiences in all topics related to programming languages, software development, systems and applications. ECOOP welcomes high quality research papers relating to these fields in a broad sense.

ECOOP 2024 will feature two submission deadlines.

Call for Papers

ECOOP is a conference about programming originally focused on object-orientation, but now including all practical and theoretical investigations of programming languages, systems and environments. ECOOP solicits innovative solutions to real problems as well as evaluations of existing solutions.

Authors are asked to pick one of the following categories:

• Research. The most traditional category for papers that advance the state of the art.
• Replication. An empirical evaluation that reconstructs a published experiment in a different context in order to validate the results of that earlier work.
• Experience. Applications of known PL techniques in practice as well as tools. Industry papers will be reviewed by practitioners. We welcome negative results that may provide inspiration for future research.
• Pearls/Brave New Ideas. Articles that either explain a known idea in an elegant way or unconventional papers introducing ideas that may take some time to substantiate. These papers may be short.

Submissions

Submission must not have been published, or have major overlap with previous work. In case of doubt, contact the chairs. Proceedings are published in open access by Dagstuhl LIPIcs in the Dagstuhl LIPIcs LaTeX-style template. To reduce friction when resubmitting, ACM’s PACMPL and TOPLAS formatted papers can be submitted as such (with the understanding that if accepted, they will be reformatted).

ECOOP uses double-anonymous reviewing. Authors’ identities are only revealed if a paper is accepted. Papers must omit author names and institutions, and use the third person when referencing the authors’ own work. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission; see the FAQ. If in doubt, contact the chairs.

There is no page limit on submissions, but authors must understand that reviewers have a fixed time budget for each paper, so the length of the feedback is likely to be unaffected by length. Brevity is a virtue. Authors also have to consider that the camera-ready version must be 25 pages in LIPIcs format (not including references).

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 length limit.

ECOOP will continue to have two deadlines for submissions. Papers submitted in each round can be (a) accepted, (b) rejected, or (c) asked for revisions. Rejected papers that are submitted to the immediate next round can be desk rejected if they do not sufficiently differ from the previous submission. Revisions can be submitted at any later round. Papers retain their reviewers during revision.

Review Criteria

Each paper will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Soundness: How well the paper’s contributions are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods;
• Significance: The extent to which the paper’s contributions are novel, original, and important, with respect to the existing body of knowledge;
• Presentation: Whether the paper’s quality of writing meets the high standards of ECOOP.

After author response and reviewer discussion, papers will be accepted if the PC decides that the paper meets our high bar for Soundness and Presentation, and if ONE reviewer judges the paper to meet the bar for Significance. The goal of this process is to ensure quality of writing and confidence in results, while assuming that if one reviewer finds the paper to be significant then there will be readers who do so as well.

Artifact Evaluation and Intent

To support replication of experiments, authors of research papers may submit artifacts to the Artifact Evaluation Committee. They will be asked whether they intend to submit an artifact at submission time. It is understood that some paper do not have artifacts. AEC members will serve on the extended review committee.

Journal First and Journal After

We have Journal First / After arrangements with ACM’s Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Elsevier’s Science of Computer Programming (SCP) and AITO’s Journal of Object Technology (JOT).

Only new research papers are eligible to be Journal First (JF). JF papers will have an extended abstract in the ECOOP proceedings. The deadline is the same as Round 1 of submissions and the notification is aligned with Round 2 notification. TOPLAS JF papers should be submitted according to this announcement. SCP JF papers should follow this call for papers. JF papers are presented at the conference and eligible for awards.

Journal After (JA) papers are papers for which the authors request to be considered for post conference journal publication. Once accepted by the ECOOP PC, these papers will be forwarded to the journal editors. Reviews and reviewers will be forwarded and used at the editor’s discretion. JA papers will have an extended abstract (up to 12 pages) in the conference proceedings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Authors: Double-Blinding Submissions

Q: What exactly do I have to do to anonymize my paper?

Use common sense. Your job is not to make your identity undiscoverable but simply to make it possible for reviewers to evaluate your submission without having to know who you are. The specific guidelines stated in the call for papers are simple: omit authors’ names from your title page, and when you cite your own work, refer to it in the third person. For example, if your name is Smith and you have worked on amphibious type systems, instead of saying “We extend our earlier work on statically typed toads [Smith 2004],” you might say “We extend Smith’s [2004] earlier work on statically typed toads.” Also, be sure not to include any acknowledgements that would give away your identity.

Q: Should I change the name of my system?

No.

Q: My submission is based on code available in a public repository. How do I deal with this?

Cite the code in your paper, but remove the URL and, instead say “link to repository removed for double blind review”. If you believe reviewer access to your code would help during author response, contact the chair.

Q: I am submitting an extension of my workshop paper, should I anonymize reference to that work?

No. But we recommend that you change the title to distinguish the papers.

Q: Am I allowed to post my paper on my web page or arXiv? send it to colleagues? give a talk about it? on social media?

There is a tension between the normal communication of scientific results and actions that essentially force potential reviewers to learn the identity of authors. Roughly speaking, you may discuss work under submission, but you should not broadly advertise your work through media that is likely to reach your reviewers. We acknowledge there are gray areas and trade-offs. Things you may do:

• Put your submission on your home page.
• Discuss your work with anyone not on the review committees.
• Present your work at professional meetings, workshops, job interviews, etc.
• Post on arXiv or a similar site.

Reviewers will not be asked to recuse themselves from reviewing your paper unless they feel you have gone out of your way to advertise your authorship information to them. If you are unsure about what constitutes “going out of your way”, please contact us.

Reviewers: Double-blind

Q: What should I do if I if I learn the authors’ identity?

If at any point you feel that the authors’ actions are largely aimed at ensuring that potential reviewers know their identity, you should contact the Program Chair. Otherwise you should not treat double-blind reviewing differently from regular blind reviewing. In particular, you should refrain from seeking out information on the authors’ identity, but if you discover it accidentally this will not automatically disqualify you as a reviewer. Use your best judgment.

Q: The authors provided a URL to supplemental material, what should I do?

Contact the chairs, who will download the material on your behalf.

Q: Can I seek an outside review?

If you think an outside reviewer would provide a valuable perspective, contact the chairs.