I am fairly certain this rule was there against an obnoxious citing style of "The lambda calculus [1] was intended as a foundation for mathematics". It is especially obnoxious in the case of CS because when you cite e.g. "as Johns comments in his article about future developments of the programming languages [1963a]" it is quite important to know that this paper is actually from 1963 and can be mostly disregarded except as a historic curiosity; yet I've seen people vehemently defending this "[1]" style.
Is citation style really an issue? Even if they don't state which style they expect, surely you can tell their expected style from their existing publications? With proper tooling (e.g. LaTeX+BibTeX) it's pretty painless to switch styles.
Here's that rant of a blog from D.J. Bernstein [0] about how "[3, 7, 42]" citation style is superior and promotes scientific progress that I was thinking about when I wrote my comment. I personally find most of his reasoning pretty unconvincing; and so while I understand Meyer's irritation, I have to say I have to side with OOPSLA here. After all, you'd also probably want the submitted papers to be written in somewhat better than 5th-grade-high-school-student's English, and don't have way too many typos (I talk like ~15 typos per page).
Opinions vary on citation styles, my point was that it seems reasonable for a publication to standardise on one citation style, i.e. to require its use. I'm not sure it's what dynm meant by very complicated (and unstated) "rules" for how a paper is supposed to look. That article by DJB mentions that every author really ought to be using a citation-management solution like BibTeX, so that regardless of your preferences, it's easy to change your whole paper to a different citation style.
There's a slight (but only slight) irony in your use of the HackerNews convention for handling multiple links without breaking up the body of the main text. In this short-form medium it works great. I see someone made this same point in the thread you linked, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673426
By complicated and unstated rules, I meant sort of norms about how you talk about previous work, how you caption figures, what order you have for the sections, how self-congratulatory vs. humble you are, etc. Theoretically, there are no rules for these things. But in practice, insiders seem to adopt a (deliberately?) complex ruleset and use it to signal to each other that they insiders.
The only time I like numbers is writing proposals and I only like it because it saves space. Other than that I much prefer (name, year) if I am to have a preference at all.
