Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ALF (programming language)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result was delete. Yamamoto Ichiro (山本一郎)(会話) 04:41, 20 June 2007 (UTC) upon further examination, the result is no consensus, defaulting to keep. Yamamoto Ichiro (山本一郎)(会話) 16:30, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

ALF (programming language)

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No mention of its notability. The only results I can find via google are this page, the answers.com version of this page and the linked author's page. Delete it as non-notable. Localzuk(talk) 14:51, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete nn. JJL 17:19, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete, non-notable, and no sources. *Cremepuff  222*  21:21, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Strong keep. Notable topic in computer science. Appears in at least eight published papers and in dozens of books. Preponderance of reliable sources is unquestionable. It is currently listed at the CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository. Topic is discussed in the 2002 book, Knowledge Media in Healthcare, ISBN 1930708130, as well as the 1995 publication, Intelligent Agents, ISBN 3540588558, and the 1997 publication by MIT Press, Logic Programming, ISBN 0262631806.  Boley calls ALF a "typical current proposal in the field of extended, declarative programming" and describes it a 1999 publication entitled, A Tight, Practical Integration of Relations and Functions, ISBN 3540666443.  Also discussed in Thompson, Simon. (1997). Constructive interval temporal logic in Alf. In  International Conference on Temporal Logic .Applied Logic. Kluwer, Hanus; also M. and A. Schwab. (1991). The Implementation of the Functional-Logic Language ALF. FB Informatik, Univ. Dortmund. &mdash;Viriditas | Talk 01:54, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. I've read elsewhere that people have been having trouble finding third-party sources for this. SlimVirgin (talk) 01:57, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete. Can't find any reliable sources showing notability as a real language. There are lots of created languages that get written up in some obscure paper, and the language is never actually used for any real projects. Crum375 02:06, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete - published papers cited above are all by the creator of the language. The books linked all appear to be conference proceedings: probably with reprints of papers by the creator. The other claims are more difficult to verify but at the moment independent sources appear to be missing. -- BPMullins | Talk 02:27, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Keep. Google scholar lists ~120 papers related in some way to ALF. Many of these are trivial mentions but Compiling Logic Programs with Equality (one of Hanus' papers) is not and has 71 citations. Another of Hanus' ALF papers, Improving Control of Logic Programs by Using Functional Logic Languages, has an additional 29 citations. These are not amazing cite numbers but they're pretty good; enough, I think, to establish notability. —David Eppstein 07:10, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment Is there any reason to believe that these are ALF-related citations? The term 'ALF' doesn't appear in the titles of the papers, so the references to it could be passing. JJL 13:23, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * You mean the two I singled out? Yes, there is a reason, but you have to take the effort to actually look at the papers and not just the titles. Many of the results on the ALF search just include it in lists of logic languages (that's what I meant about trivial mentions) but these two articles are about how certain logic programming issues can be handled in ALF specifically. —David Eppstein 15:50, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletions.   -- John Vandenberg 10:18, 13 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Keep - notable language for IT/CS geeks. Yes, the article needs references and citations, but that's a re-write issue, not a deletion issue.  - NDCompuGeek 15:07, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment: the current text is horrible technobabble and much less useful than the other pages about computer languages. Pavel Vozenilek 15:26, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete: ALF is not notable. All 8 references cited above are written by the same person, the language's creator, and they discuss various computer science topics in the context of his pet language. As interesting to the average computer geek as ALF may be (hey I even downloaded it), Wikipedia is not a compendium of every computer language ever thought up. --Jquarry 05:12, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Could you clarify that; this list includes 120, and they dont appear to be trivial or all written by the same person. John Vandenberg 05:33, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.