History of Programming Languages (HOPL) is an infrequent ACM

SIGPLAN SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. Conferences * Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) * Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) * International Symposium on M ...

conference. Past conferences were held in 1978, 1993, and 2007. The fourth conference was originally intended to take place in June 2020, but was postponed to 2021.

HOPL I

HOPL I was held June 1 – 3, 1978 in

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

Jean E. Sammet Jean E. Sammet (March 23, 1928 – May 20, 2017) was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also one of the developers of the influential COBOL programming language. She received her B.A. i ...

was both the general and program committee chair. John A. N. Lee was the administrative chair. Richard L. Wexelblat was the proceedings chair. From Sammet's introduction: The HOPL Conference "is intended to consider the technical factors which influenced the development of certain selected programming languages." The languages and presentations in the first HOPL were by invitation of the program committee. The invited languages must have been created and in use by 1967. They also must have remained in use in 1977. Finally, they must have had considerable influence on the field of computing. The papers and presentations went through extensive review by the program committee (and revisions by the authors), far beyond the norm for conferences and commensurate with some of the best journals in the field. Preprints of the proceedings were published in ''SIGPLAN Notices'' (volume 13, issue 8, August 1978). The final proceedings, including transcripts of question and answer sessions, was published as a book in the ACM Monograph Series: ''History of Programming Languages'', edited by Wexelblat (Academic press, 1981).

HOPL II

HOPL II was held April 20–23, 1993 in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

. John A.N. Lee was the conference chair and Sammet again was the program chair. In contrast to HOPL I, HOPL II included both invited papers and papers submitted in response to an open call. The scope also expanded. Where HOPL I had only papers on the early history of languages, HOPL II solicited contributions on: * early history of specific languages, * evolution of a language, * history of language features and concepts, and * classes of languages for application-oriented languages and paradigm-oriented languages. The submitted and invited languages must have been documented by 1982. They also must have been in use or taught by 1985. As in HOPL I, there was a rigorous multi-stage review and revision process. Preprints of the proceedings were published in ''SIGPLAN Notices'' (volume 28, issue 3, March 1993). The final proceedings, including copies of the presentations and transcripts of question and answer sessions, was published as the ACM Press book: ''History of Programming Languages'', edited by Thomas J. Bergin and Richard G. Gibson (Addison Wesley, 1996).

HOPL III

HOPL III was held June 9–10, 2007 in

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

. Brent Hailpern and Barbara G. Ryder were the conference co-chairs. HOPL III had an open call for participation and asked for papers on either the early history or the evolution of programming languages. The languages must have come into existence before 1996 and been widely used since 1998, either commercially or within a specific domain. Research languages that had a great influence on subsequent programming languages were also candidates for submission. As with HOPL I and HOPL II, the papers were managed with a multiple stage review/revision process. The HOPL III programming languages can be broadly categorized into five classes (or

paradigms In science and philosophy, a paradigm () is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. Etymology ''Paradigm'' comes f ...

Object-Oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...

(

Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It w ...

Oberon Oberon () is a king of the fairies in medieval and Renaissance literature. He is best known as a character in William Shakespeare's play ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', in which he is King of the Fairies and spouse of Titania, Queen of the Fair ...

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

Self The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhood ...

, Emerald, and

BETA Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

Functional Functional may refer to: * Movements in architecture: ** Functionalism (architecture) ** Form follows function * Functional group, combination of atoms within molecules * Medical conditions without currently visible organic basis: ** Functional sy ...

(

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming lang ...

), Scripting (

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system automa ...

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

), Reactive ( Erlang, StateCharts), and

Parallel Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to: Computing * Parallel algorithm * Parallel computing * Parallel metaheuristic * Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel * Parallel Sysplex, a cluster of IBM ...

( ZPL,

High Performance Fortran High Performance Fortran (HPF) is an extension of Fortran 90 with constructs that support parallel computing, published by the ''High Performance Fortran Forum'' (HPFF). The HPFF was convened and chaired by Ken Kennedy of Rice University. The fi ...

). Each HOPL III paper describes the perspective of the creators of the language.

HOPL IV

HOPL IV was to be held June 14–16, 2020 in London, United Kingdom, but was postponed to 2021 due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

. The conference co-chairs were

Guy L. Steele Jr. Guy Lewis Steele Jr. (; born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards. Biography Steele was born in Missouri ...

and

Richard P. Gabriel Richard P. Gabriel (born 1949) is an American computer scientist known for his work in computing related to the programming language Lisp, and especially Common Lisp. His best known work was a 1990 essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Bi ...

. The languages covered in this conference had to be widely adopted by 2011.

References

External links

Official HOPL III conference websiteOfficial HOPL IV conference websiteHOPL: an interactive Roster of Programming LanguagesHistory of Programming Languages Conference Records 1972-1993

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...