Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pure (programming language)

Pure (programming language)

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This language fails to meet the general notability guideline. As sources, I found:

the projects website, which obviously doesn't count
one hit on Hacker News, which is user-generated content and therefore unacceptable for establishing notability
a "book" (actually just a pdf on the website) that has been cited twice, according to Google Scholar. http://wiki.pure-lang.googlecode.com/hg/docs/pure-intro/pure-intro.pdf
An academic-looking pdf on linuxaudio.org, which has been cited 0 times (http://lac.linuxaudio.org/2009/cdm/Saturday/19_Graef/19.pdf)

Not good enough for establishing notability. Christopher Monsanto (talk) 17:11, 12 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please keep. Disclaimer: I'm the designer of that language and the primary developer, but I didn't create this article, although I'm among its editors.

The "academic-looking pdf" is actually a refereed article from the Linux Audio Conference 2009 proceedings. It's true that Pure is a relatively new and experimental language, but as a PL researcher you know very well that these projects just take time to mature to a point where you can write a bunch of papers about them. In fact, I have academic papers in the pipeline for two more conferences this year, and I also got an invitation from the organizers of the "Emerging Languages" track at OSCON 2011 to give a presentation about Pure (alas, I don't have the time to go this year, but it's already on my list for next year). Apparently, the LLVM team also thinks that Pure is quite notable, otherwise they wouldn't mention it on their project website and in their release notes, and in fact the LLVM Wikipedia article also links to this one.

More generally, I think that judging programming languages and other complex pieces of software by academic publications alone is a bit short-sighted. At least, the criteria being applied here warrant further discussion, and I'm not sure that individual AfDs are the right place to do this. One of WP's strong points over dead tree encyclopedia is its wide spectrum of up-to-date information. If you remove anything from the PL section which hasn't gone through the test of time yet, then WP's PL section will soon look pretty deserted, and WP will be poorer for it. Ag (talk) 14:34, 13 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]