Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cryptol

This discussion was subject to a deletion review on 2009 January 1.
For an explanation of the process, see Wikipedia:Deletion review.

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. MBisanz ^talk 23:50, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Cryptol

Not yet notable programming language. I was actually seriously considering making this article when I saw the post on Slashdot myself that linked to the one source currently in use--which is a blog post by the company that itself developed the language. All the other sources online currently are just reposts or links back to that same blog. It's not yet notable under WP:RS. rootology (C)(T) 14:19, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

~~Keep~~ Weak delete I think this is will someday be sufficiently notable to warrant an article. It's newsworthy software from a cryptography standpoint, particularly given its provenance, and the article will surely be expanded as the public starts making use of it. RandomHumanoid^(⇒) 17:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But we don't even have a single RS yet for WP:RS or notability today. Its still just the blog post by the company that disclosed it; even the normally fast IT/tech news sources, who would be fine, haven't even touched it. rootology (C)(T) 18:39, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you're probably right. However, the NSA has only recently started open sourcing some of its projects (e.g., http://www.nsa.gov/selinux), so this is certainly part of a historic precedent. --RandomHumanoid^(⇒) 19:27, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - If htis is at all serious, someday it might belong on Wikipedia. Clearly right now it dosn't even come close. It's just a gleam in the corporate public relations team's eye. DreamGuy (talk) 18:41, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have to say that even though I changed my mind above, this is clearly very exciting news to a particular important research community. --RandomHumanoid^(⇒) 19:29, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - I want to say keep on this one, but it doesn't seem to meet the basic notability guidelines (yet). I do have a question though. Can Slashdot be considered a reliable news source? (It's a news website with editorial control, and one of the most-respected in its genre.) If so, it doesn't matter that they used primary sources for information, the fact that Slashdot deemed it notable means something. LinguistAtLarge 20:34, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Slashdot links to all sorts of everything. Mere mention there does not establish notability. As far as I knew, they didn't have editorial oversight, just the public voting. DreamGuy (talk) 22:59, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that the editors of Slashdot select a limited number of submitted stories to run on each individual day, so this is a modicum of editorial control. On the other hand, the hundreds of comments following each capsule story are obviously self-published, and votes or no, most are by anonymous nonexperts. Squidfryerchef (talk) 02:32, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Weak Keep. Besides a flurry of commentary on some blogs, some of which may count as expert SPS, there are some academic papers that precede it becoming open source. i.e. "Cryptol: high assurance, retargetable crypto development and validation"[1] ( scroll down to see abstract ). Google Scholar shows a few more; search for Cryptol and Galois to filter out citations to "J. Cryptol", an academic journal about cryptography. Squidfryerchef (talk) 02:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. The published academic papers that mention Cryptol other than in passing are written by people involved with the Cryptol project (e.g. for the paper referenced above, Jeff Lewis works at Galois Connections, and Brad Martin at the NSA). Maybe Cryptol will become notable, but it is impossible to tell now if and when that will be the case. Perhaps the future is for cryptological libraries in more general languages rather than such domain-specific languages; who can say? Currently the article does not meet Wikipedia's criteria. Whether it is an exciting and important development for important people in an important field is irrelevant if that importance is not reflected in independent reliable sources. 88.235.63.32 (talk) 20:05, 29 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. Could this be merged to National Security Agency#Effect on non-governmental cryptography? While some more sources have started to appear on Google News from Russian and Italian news sites, and I'm sure eventually we'll have enough info to write an article on this special-purpose language on par with the article on SNOBOL, I don't know if we'll have enough for independent notability before the AFD is over. However, from Galois's press release and other primary-source material, the Slashdot and other news articles, and the academic paper, we should have enough for a paragraph in that section. Squidfryerchef (talk) 21:38, 30 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep What? It's in my programming book, in the index. We discuss it in class all of the time, just one of the many languages mentioned. There are so many weird AfDs I feel like maybe I misread this or something.... --KP Botany (talk) 11:22, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reallly? Got a cite for that? Does it meet the non-trivial coverage in reliable source criteria? Doubtful. If yuo think this AFD is weird perhaps you should bone up on Wikipedia policies. DreamGuy (talk) 15:14, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, yeah, I got a cite for that, I added it to the article. Possibly you should bone up on Wikipedia policies, like how useful the citations are in the articles, versus sitting back here discussing deleting an article. I'd discuss it more, but I write articles. You might want to bone up on something else: things are often on the web before they're in books. If I'm finding it in books already, the google news hits don't matter. --KP Botany (talk) 19:23, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Books, hmm. Google Books is showing a few hits.[2] One is the MILCOM 2003 conference cited above. But there are others. There is "Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on the ACL2 Theorem Prover", which mentions translating Cryptol to LISP, there is "ACM SIGPLAN Notices", where they talk about notation used in Cryptol, there is "Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning", which says "Cryptol provides a uniform stream-based view of all the data involv[ed] in encryption, and supports that view with an interesting type system reflecting how functions manipulate streams. C code can be generated from Cryptol programs, and there is also a path to FPGAs.", there is "Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages", which talks about Cryptol, etc. Google Scholar shows some similar material but it has several additional works on translating Cryptol to other languages or to FPGAs. Squidfryerchef (talk) 14:31, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it's not a new programming language, and it has a presence outside of google. It's pretty much discussed in all of my upper division programming courses and, yes, it's in the textbook (the conference papers) I'm reading right now. It's interesting because of how it does what it does, which people aren't too sure about, yet, but are trying to figure out. There's no reason to wait for the article. --KP Botany (talk) 19:23, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it looks like we've confirmed this article is sourceable beyond a mention in a blog. While I'd like to find more sources that discuss the impact of this language, at minimum this could be merged to the aforementioned section of the NSA article, where it discusses DES, AES, and other algorithms, academic research, and patents the NSA has released. Squidfryerchef (talk) 23:15, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why? Although I know it's an NSA language, I've never discussed it in any of my classes in that context, what's intriguing is that it supposedly shows the process stream through the entire time the program is being run so the cryptographer can interact with the program. It's in books already, by itself; it's been in books for a while. It's a rather specialized topic, so it's never going to be widespread, but it's not in books because it's from the NSA, and it's not being discussed for that aspect. It's the algorithm we're interested in. --KP Botany (talk) 23:22, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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.