Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Part of the experience of being a scientist, in the industrial age of publication, is the rejection letter; especially the damning review whose author, anonymous of course, does not appear particularly competent. I have my own treasured collection, which I will publish one day. For a fiction so artfully designed as to be almost as good as the real thing, you can check  Simone Santini’s hilarious parody [1], a true classic.

Although there are a few references to it around the Web, I do not think it is as well known as it deserves to be. What Santini did was to imagine rejection letters for famous papers. He stated [2] that:

The reviews are a collage of reviews that I have seen of some papers (mine and of other people) that have been rejected because, I thought, the reviewer had completely misunderstood the paper. After a rejection at a database conference for what I thought were completely preposterous reasons, I had the idle thought that today even Codd’s paper on relational data bases (the foundation of the whole field) would never make it into a major data base conference…Many of the sentences that I use in the article are from actual reviews.

A sample from the imaginary Codd rejection letter:

E.F. CODD “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.”  … The formalism is needlessly complex and mathematical, using concepts and notation with which the average data bank practitioner is unfamiliar. The paper doesn’t tell us how to translate its arcane operations into executable block access.

Adding together the lack of any real-world example, performance experiment, and implementation indication or detail, we are left with an obscure exercise using unfamiliar mathematics and of little or no practical consequence. It can be safely rejected.

All the others are gems too: Turing’s Entscheidungsproblem paper (“If the article is accepted, Turing should remember that the language of this journal is English and change the title accordingly”); Dijstra’s Goto considered harmful; Hoare’s 1969 axiomatic semantics paper (the author “should also extend the method to be applicable to a standard programming language such as COBOL or PL/I and provide the details of his implementation, possibly with a few graphics to show how the system works in practice”) etc.

To avoid a spoiler I will  cite no more;  you should read the paper if you do not know it yet. It rings so true.

References

[1] Simone Santini: We Are Sorry to Inform You …, in IEEE Computer, vol. 38, no. 12, pp. 128, 126-127, December 2005,  online on the IEEE site. There is also a copy here.

 [2] http://www.omlettesoft.com/newjournal.php3?who=Lord+Omlette&id=1134629858.