thedixitjain POPL Workflow
POPL's seat in the SIGPLAN year is fixed and unforgiving: submit in July, hear in early October, revise and package artifacts in the fall, present in January. For POPL 2027 (verified 2026-07-08): deadline July 9, 2026 AoE; notification October 5, 2026; symposium January 10-16, 2027, Mexico City. There is no abstract deadline and no second call. POPL is a conference — no editor-in-chief, no submission fee; the chairs rotate per edition (2027 names 待核实) and publication costs run through PACMPL's open-access model, not author-facing page charges in the normal case.
Backward plan from a July deadline
| Weeks before deadline | Theory-paper milestone |
|---|---|
| 16+ | Core calculus stable; main theorem conjectured precisely |
| 12 | Hard lemmas proved on paper; mechanization of the kernel started |
| 8 | Main theorem proved; decide mechanize-vs-hand-prove split per theorem |
| 6 | Case studies or prototype evidence frozen (popl-experiments) |
| 4 | Full draft in acmsmall; informal-to-formal ramp reviewed by an outsider |
| 2 | Mock review by someone who tries to break the theorem, not the prose |
| 1 | Anonymity sweep of paper + proof archive; correspondence table regenerated |
| 0 | HotCRP upload with hours of AoE margin, not minutes |
The distinctive scheduling truth: theorems do not compress. An experiment can be rerun overnight; a broken lemma two weeks out cannot be fixed by working weekends. Freeze the formal core earlier than feels necessary.
The fall gauntlet (acceptance path)
October notification opens three parallel tracks that all land before January:
- Committee revision — mandatory, deadline set at notification
(
popl-camera-ready). - Artifact evaluation — by invitation for conditionally accepted papers; the
no-admit/no-sorry pass and Zenodo archiving take real days
(
popl-artifact-evaluation). - January logistics — visa appointment, registration, talk. Mexico City in January is an international trip for most authors; start visas the week the decision lands.
If July slips: the PACMPL deadline wheel
All four SIGPLAN flagships publish in the same journal, so retargeting costs reviewer culture, not archival quality. From POPL's July seat, the recent pattern (verify each venue's current call — dates rotate):
POPL (July deadline, January conference) <- you are here
-> OOPSLA: next PACMPL deadline after July in recent cycles
-> PLDI: November-ish deadline, June conference
-> ICFP: late-winter/spring deadline, fall conference
Retarget rule: move to the venue whose reviewers match your EVIDENCE,
not the nearest date — see popl-topic-selection.
Never park the same paper at two of them at once; dual submission burns the pair.
Output format
[Current stage] framing / proving / mechanizing / drafting / submitted / response / revision / production
[Next hard date] <event + date + source URL, or 待核实>
[Critical path] <the three tasks that gate the next date>
[Frozen vs fluid] <what may still change without cascading into proofs>
[Fallback] <retarget venue + its verified deadline, if July is unrealistic>
Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → POPL-Skills/skills/popl-workflow/SKILL.md