PL alignment chart
pldb alignment
PW Philip Wadler
Chaotic Theorist. 36% colons, a repeat co-author on 80% of papers, 25% at POPL, has never met an ICSE.
Theorist Hacker Engineer Lawful Theorist Proves the lemma's lemma Lawful Hacker Same compiler, same crew Lawful Engineer Has a process for the process Neutral Theorist Semantics first, questions later Neutral Hacker Ships it, benchmarks it Neutral Engineer Mines the repo, files the issue Chaotic Theorist A new calculus every paper Chaotic Hacker Rewrote it in Rust again Chaotic Engineer Empirical study of everything EB PW
Why Theorist
75% of papers at theory venues
79th percentile · theory 75%, systems 11%, SE 0%
Repeat co-author
80%
32nd percentile · more is lawful
Colon titles
36%
59th percentile · more is chaotic
Top-venue share
25% POPL
8th percentile · more is lawful
Lawfulness
5th percentile
top third Lawful, bottom Chaotic
Compared with
EDB
79% colons, a repeat co-author on 86% of papers, 43% at OOPSLA, has never met a POPL
All the numbers 75% 79 0% 21 POPL, ICFP, ESOP, CPP, CAV, TACAS … 11% 51 82% 92 PLDI, OOPSLA, CGO, CC, PPoPP, ISMM, DLS 0% 21 14% 51 ICSE, FSE, ASE, SLE 80% 32 86% 48 more is lawful 36% 59 79% 95 more is chaotic 25% POPL 8 43% OOPSLA 51 more is lawful
Column: whichever of theory, systems or SE venue share (of your 53 papers) has your highest percentile. Row: lawfulness = mean of pct(repeat co-author), 1 − pct(colon titles), pct(top-venue share), then ranked again: top third Lawful, bottom third Chaotic. Percentiles among the 4,969 authors with 5+ papers in PLDB. Repeat co-author: share of your co-authored papers with someone who is on another of your papers too.
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pldb alignment