Salon des Refusés -- Dialectics for new computer science

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Feyerabend Project organized several workshops to discuss and develop new ways to think of programming languages and computing in general. A new event in this direction is a new workshop that will take place in Brussels, in April, co-located with the new <Programming> conference -- also worth a look.

Salon des Refusés -- Dialectics for new computer science April 2017, Brussels

Salon des Refusés (“exhibition of rejects”) was an 1863 exhibition of artworks rejected from the official Paris Salon. The jury of Paris Salon required near-photographic realism and classified works according to a strict genre hierarchy. Paintings by many, later famous, modernists such as Édouard Manet were rejected and appeared in what became known as the Salon des Refusés. This workshop aims to be the programming language research equivalent of Salon des Refusés. We provide venue for exploring new ideas and new ways of doing computer science.

Many interesting ideas about programming might struggle to find space in the modern programming language research community, often because they are difficult to evaluate using established evaluation methods (be it proofs, measurements or controlled user studies). As a result, new ideas are often seen as “unscientific”.

This workshop provides a venue where such interesting and thought provoking ideas can be exposed to critical evaluation. Submissions that provoke interesting discussion among the program committee members will be published together with an attributed review that presents an alternative position, develops additional context or summarizes discussion from the workshop. This means of engaging with papers not just enables explorations of novel programming ideas, but also enourages new ways of doing computer science.

The workshop's webpage also contains descriptions of of some formats that could "make it possible to think about programming in a new way", including: Thought experiments, Experimentation, Paradigms, Metaphors, myths and analogies, and From jokes to science fiction.

For writings on similar questions about formalism, paradigms or method in programming language research, see Richard Gabriel's work, especially The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution (2012) and Writers’ Workshops As Scientific Methodology (?)), Thomas Petricek's work, especially Against a Universal Definition of 'Type' (2015) and Programming language theory Thinking the unthinkable (2016)), and Jonathan Edwards' blog: Alarmind Development.

For programs of events of similar inspiration in the past, you may be interested in the Future of Programming workshops: program of 2014, program of September 2015, program of October 2015. Other events that are somewhat similar in spirit -- but maybe less radical in content -- are Onward!, NOOL and OBT.