I read a blog entry by Matthew Sackman regarding a paper he co-wrote. It was entitled “Session Types in Haskell” and was submitted to Haskell Symposium 2008. The paper was not accepted for the symposium. Apparently the paper was reviewed by 3 different individuals. The decision to not accept the paper was made by these 3 people. Matthew’s post essentially challenged the comments he received from his reviewers.
I must confess that it seems like he was whining throughout his response to the feedback. Now I can understand that his paper may have taken a lot of work to produce. However I cannot understand what he was trying to achieve by crying over the spilled milk. He did come forward and say that he was initially must more upset about the decision on his paper. In this word of the web, why can’t you just publish your paper on the Internet?
If your work is truly revolutionary, you can just post your paper in your blog. Better yet you can publish it on your web site. Yes you will need to do a little marketing to get your idea out. Reddit or Digg can help with that. It will not carry the same weight as if it were presented at a conference. But so what? Another angle would be that you could improve it, or come out with a stronger paper next year. The best revenge is to triumph and become famous and rich.
Somehow I suspect that Linus Torvalds may have received some rough feedback the first time he put out his ideas for a new kernel. I bet he didn’t go running home to his mommy. Well, since he actually lived with his parents when he wrote the Linux kernel he may have gone home. But he would have locked himself in the room with his computer, written tight code, and owned the UNIX world. The sooner you get a good attitude, the sooner you will overcome a bad day.
Cheer up Matt. Before yesterday I had never heard about you. If your paper was accepted at Haskell Symposium 2008, I still may have never heard of you. Now I do know a little about you. And I don’t think highly of your post that whined. Your blog is hard to navigate too. But I am hoping you take this opportunity to come back with a vengeance and become famous. Then I can say that I wrote a blog entry about you when you were a nobody and were down on your luck. Mkay?
