Pattern Languages of Programs is the name of a group of annual conferences sponsored by The Hillside Group. The purpose of these conferences is to develop and refine the art of

software design pattern In software engineering, a software design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into source or machine code ...

s. Most of the effort focuses on developing a textual presentation of a pattern such that it becomes easy to understand and apply. This is typically done in a

writers' workshop An authors' conference or writers' conference is a type of conference where writers gather to review their written works and suggest improvements. This process helps an author improve their work and learn to be a better writer for future works, bo ...

setting.

The flagship conference

The flagship conference is called the Pattern Languages of Programs conference, abbreviated as PLoP. PLoP has been held in the U.S.A. since 1994. Until 2004 it was held annually at Allerton Park in Monticello, Illinois, a property of the

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

. Since then, its location has alternated between Allerton park and being co-located with

OOPSLA OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications) is an annual ACM research conference. OOPSLA mainly takes place in the United States, while the sister conference of OOPSLA, ECOOP, is typically held in Europe. It is opera ...

, a large computer science conference, with the Agile Conference in 2009, and with PUARL in 2018. The 27th PLoP will be held in Keystone, Colorado. Notable people who chaired the conference in the past include Ward Cunningham, Richard Gabriel, Ralph Johnson,

John Vlissides John Matthew Vlissides (August 2, 1961 – November 24, 2005) was a software engineer known mainly as one of the four authors (referred to as the Gang of Four) of the book '' Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software''. Vliss ...

and

Kent Beck Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 ori ...

. PLoP (and several other Pattern Languages of Programs conferences) are sponsored by The Hillside Group, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that holds the PLoP trademark and the rights to the conference.

Locations and Organizers

Other PLoP conferences

AsianPLoP

AsianPLoP
is the PLoP event for the Asian community, commonly featuring patterns in both English and Japanese language.

ChiliPLoP

ChiliPLoP
is an annual conference featuring "hot topics" of the PLoP community. It is held in the U.S. since 1998.

EuroPLoP

Held since 1996 in Kloster Irsee, Germany (former monastery, now Swabian Conference and Education Centre).

KoalaPLoP

Held in Australia or New Zealand.

MensorePLoP

MensorePLoP '2001
held on the island of

Okinawa is a prefecture of Japan. Okinawa Prefecture is the southernmost and westernmost prefecture of Japan, has a population of 1,457,162 (as of 2 February 2020) and a geographic area of 2,281 km2 (880 sq mi). Naha is the capital and largest city ...

, Japan.

MiniPLoP

MiniPLoP'2011
held in IME/USP,

São Paulo São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the GaWC a ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

ScrumPLoP

SugarLoafPLoP

SugarLoafPLoP
held in Brazil.

VikingPLoP

VikingPLoP
held mostly in the Scandinavian countries, but also moving around in Europe.

Publications

The conference proceedings are typically published locally as technical reports of a sponsoring university. From 1998 to 2007, EuroPLoP papers were published annually by the German publisher ''Universitätsverlag Konstanz''. Between 2008 and 2012 proceedings appeared in several places. CEUR-WS hold
papers for 2008
an
papers for 2009
(in addition a complete set of 2009 papers are available from

Lulu.com Lulu Press, Inc., doing business under trade name Lulu, is an online print-on-demand, self-publishing, and distribution platform. By 2014, it had issued approximately two million titles. The company's founder is Red Hat co-founder Bob Young. Lu ...

in printed and PDF formats). A printed version of EuroPLoP 2012 papers are also available on Lulu.com. Since 2012 a subset of EuroPLoP papers have been submitted to the ACM Digital Library. After the conference, authors are given the chance to submit a revised paper for publication in the book series ''Pattern Languages of Program Design'' by

Addison Wesley Addison-Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson PLC, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributes its technical titles through ...

. In 2007, an academic journal was started, called ''Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming.'' The editors-in-chief are James Noble and Ralph Johnson and the European editor is Uwe Zdun. The journal is published by

Springer-Verlag Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Originally founded in 1842 in ...

References

External links

* The homepage of th
Pattern Languages of Programs
conferences, organized by the Hillside Group * The LinkedIn group fo
PLoP
* The homepage of th
European Pattern Languages of Programs
conference, organized by

Hillside Europe Hillside may refer to the side of a hill. Places Australia * Hillside mine, a proposed mine on the Yorke Peninsula, South Australia * Hillside, New South Wales *Hillside, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne Canada * Hillside, Nova Scotia United Ki ...

* Springer Verlag's homepage for th
Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming
journal * Ward's wik
HistoryOfPatterns
including how PLoP came about {{Authority control Software engineering conferences