Wadler's Blog

Lambda the Ultimate has a post describing a paper by Shane Markstrum bewailing the unjustified claims one finds in papers on programming languages. I completely agree with him, but his plan seems to be to thoroughly document the current poor state of the science; I wish that instead he would do one study of the form that he (and I) would like to see. Markstrum's bibliography lists a paper performing a study of that sort, by Lutz Prechelt of Karlsruhe, and I've listed it above. Here's to more such studies!

Another paper bewailing the lack of empiricism for computing generally is Experimental evaluation in computer science: A quantitative study by Walter F. Tichy, Paul Lukowicz, Lutz Prechelt and Ernst A. Heinz. (Yes, it's the same Prechelt.)