SPLASH

Welcome to the 2012 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA). We believe that we have selected an interesting and high-quality program of research papers. As you will see, OOPSLA continues to expand beyond the conference's 1986 roots in object-oriented programming. This year's papers discuss many topics, including: concurrency, verification, program analysis, types, fault detection, program understanding, dynamic languages, compilation, and a variety of approaches that support the program development process. As you can see from this topic list, this instance of OOPSLA continues to explore core issues in programming languages and reaches out to connect with broader issues in software engineering.

Papers were reviewed by a combination of the OOPSLA program committee (PC), consisting of 31 experts in the field, and the OOPSLA external review committee (ERC), also consisting of 31 experts. Each paper was assigned to at least three committee members to review; submissions from PC members were treated specially as discussed below. The reviews were made available to authors who were then able to write a response providing clarification to reviewers. Author responses were read and, in some cases, used to identify papers for which an additional fourth review was needed. The program committee meeting, which was held on June 29--30, 2012 at the Harris Center of the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, was attended by all of the OOPSLA PC members. I would like to thank Gary Leavens and Rochelle Elva for all of their assistance with the organization and operation of the program committee meeting.

OOPSLA is a healthy research conference. This year a record number of papers, 228, were submitted and 59 were accepted. This 25.8% acceptance rate is slightly higher than the historical average of 24.4%.

The OOPSLA conference allows committee members to submit papers. Papers co-authored by program committee members were reviewed by the ERC. Discussion of those submissions and acceptance decisions were made separately from the program committee meeting. The papers were all evaluated individually and held to a slightly higher standard than non-PC submissions. This year, 21 papers were submitted with program committee co-authors, and 5 were accepted.

It is an honor and a privilege to serve as research program chair for OOPSLA 2012. It is also a pleasure to work with the many dedicated professionals who comprised the PC and ERC for OOPSLA. I thank them for all of the time and effort they contributed to help build a strong program. As those who have served on PCs know, the amount of work that goes into reviewing papers is significant and it is often quite impressive to see the quality and depth of feedback that fellow reviewers provide to authors. This year I decided to consult with the PC to identify a member of the PC who did a particularly noteworthy job in reviewing papers, responding to author feedback and the feedback of other reviewers, and advocating for papers during the PC meeting. Seven individuals were nominated, which indicates the breadth of quality in the conduct of the PC this year. Isil Dillig received the most nominations and she has the honor of being named 2012 OOPSLA Distinguished Reviewer.

I hope that you find the papers that we have accepted for inclusion in OOPSLA 2012 to be both of current interest and of long-term significance to the OOPSLA community.