Well that sucks. We just couldn't get our multilanguage semantics paper together for the POPL deadline; we could've submitted a badly-written, unclear paper, but we talked about it and decided this work was strong enough that it should get a proper treatment. And with teaching and the programming contest and various other scheduling conflicts, I just haven't had time to give it what it deserved. That doesn't just mean that I didn't write it up clearly enough, but it also kept us from identifying a couple of good, small but significant extra pieces of research we should've done. Nothing major, just some extra systems we should've built that would strengthen the narrative.

I'm happy with that decision and I think it was the right decision, but it does create a problem: it doesn't look like there will be a suitable venue to publish this work until at least next year's ICFP, which is more than a year away, and this work is more suitable for POPL anyway (for one thing, it has nothing necessarily to do with functional programming but has a lot to do with the principles of programming languages in general). So I think I'll do the extra research we decided on and then write up a tech report. We'd need to do a tech report version of this paper anyway since at one level it's all about proving type-soundness of a whole bunch of multilanguage systems, and putting it out there as a tech report will finally give me something I can point people at when they ask me what I'm doing. Once a conference comes around that seems appropriate, we'll take the report out and submit it. Not ideal, but probably the best available option. And I'm really confident in the work itself; we continue to find more fertile areas to explore within the framework we've made. I think when we put the report out you'll agree that it was worth the wait for us to do it right.

Anyway, from other fronts: my class seems to be going well and we actually managed to go a little faster than they did during the regular year. I think they've been able to absorb things pretty well, though the stuff we did at the end (graph algorithms in various guises) is pretty tough for people with only five weeks' experience. We'll see how much they've retained on Friday when they have their final.