For obvious reasons, I'm naturally quite excited about the PL Squibs track, based on an idea we have shamelessly stolen from linguistics.

The idea of a squib is a short, to-the-point articulation of something that's important and worth having in the record, but may not fit the shape of a traditional full paper --- sometimes simply pointing something out clearly is all you need to drive the point home!

A squib might capture undiscussed limitations of a common approach, common assumptions that are now outdated, problems to solve that nobody has noticed yet, non-obvious lessons from some work, or other under-discussed matters of import to PL research. They are meant to be concise articulations for when these things can be treated fully in something quite a bit shorter than a typical research paper.

This is a class of paper that has existed for quite a while. My editorial about PL squibs (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3785413) points out that TOPLAS has published papers that fit this heading in the past, and discusses why some of those papers fit the bill for PL squibs. But most of those papers are now 20+ years old, and it was never a class of papers that it was well-known were of interest to TOPLAS. Other times I've seen papers kicked around in traditional conference PCs with debates about whether something is really "a paper" or "a whole paper," and while most conference CfPs say papers aren't obligated to use the whole page limit... we all know that reviewers tasked with reviewing a dozen traditional papers will look askance at the odd one out. For PL squibs, brevity is a virtue, as long as it's telling the whole story.

I get that this is kind of a different category of papers, which the PL community isn't quite used to. So I fully expect to spend a lot of time answering email about whether or not X seems like it's in bounds for a PL squib submission. Don't be shy, my email address is public for a reason.