CS846 Paper Review Form - Winter 2012

Reviewer: Taha Rafiq

Paper Title: Little Languages

Author(s): Jon Bentley

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [X] Yes
 [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [X] Good 
 [ ] Marginal (very incremental)
 [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [X] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [ ] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [X] Very significant
 [ ] Significant
 [ ] Marginal significance.
 [ ] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [ ] Very well written
 [X] Generally well written
 [ ] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (award quality)
 [X] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (borderline, but lean towards acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Reject (not sure why this paper was published)


7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)

This paper discusses the importance of designing and using 'little languages' or languages that are specialized to some particular domain and do not contain all the features of full-fledged programming languages. It uses the PIC language for line drawings as a running examples and discusses many aspects of the language that make it a successful little language. An important aspect of a little language is that its output can be used as an input to be processed by a higher level language. The paper further discusses the important principles that govern the design of such languages such as simplicity, use of abstractions and linguistic structure, orthogonality, generality, completeness and extensibility.

Although the paper is old, I believe it discusses the topic of designing little languages comprehensively. The example used in the paper was well thought out and useful for the purpose of demonstrating effective use of little languages. The topic under discussion in this paper is of significant practical important and hence I believe this paper is of high impact.


8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)

S1. The paper does a good job of convincing the reader about the importance of little languages.
S2. The example used in the paper is well thought out and meaningfully used throughout the paper.
S3. The principles of designing little languages mentioned in this paper are very useful.


9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)

W1. Although it's not a weakness of the paper in itself, but the paper is rather old so some of the content is rather archaic.