Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of symb ...

s known as

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s. Programming language theory is closely related to other fields including

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, and

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

. There are a number of

academic conference An academic conference or scientific conference (also congress, symposium, workshop, or meeting) is an event for researchers (not necessarily academics) to present and discuss their scholarly work. Together with academic or scientific journals an ...

s and journals in the area.

History

In some ways, the history of programming language theory predates even the development of programming languages themselves. The

lambda calculus Lambda calculus (also written as ''λ''-calculus) is a formal system in mathematical logic for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation ...

, developed by Alonzo Church and

Stephen Cole Kleene Stephen Cole Kleene ( ; January 5, 1909 – January 25, 1994) was an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of ...

in the 1930s, is considered by some to be the world's first programming language, even though it was intended to ''model'' computation rather than being a means for programmers to ''describe'' algorithms to a computer system. Many modern

functional programming language In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that m ...

s have been described as providing a "thin veneer" over the lambda calculus, and many are easily described in terms of it. The first programming language to be invented was

Plankalkül Plankalkül () is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer. ''Kalkül'' is the German term for a formal system� ...

, which was designed by

Konrad Zuse Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program ...

in the 1940s, but not publicly known until 1972 (and not implemented until 1998). The first widely known and successful

high-level programming language In computer science, a high-level programming language is a programming language with strong Abstraction (computer science), abstraction from the details of the computer. In contrast to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language ...

was Fortran, developed from 1954 to 1957 by a team of IBM researchers led by

John Backus John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backu ...

. The success of FORTRAN led to the formation of a committee of scientists to develop a "universal" computer language; the result of their effort was

ALGOL 58 ALGOL 58, originally named IAL, is one of the family of ALGOL computer programming languages. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60. According to John Backus The Zurich ACM-GAMM Conference had two principal motives in pro ...

. Separately, John McCarthy of

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

developed Lisp, the first language with origins in academia to be successful. With the success of these initial efforts, programming languages became an active topic of research in the 1960s and beyond. Some other key events in the history of programming language theory since then:

1950s

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...

developed the

Chomsky hierarchy In formal language theory, computer science and linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy (also referred to as the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy) is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. This hierarchy of grammars was described by ...

in the field of linguistics, a discovery which has directly impacted programming language theory and other branches of computer science.

1960s

* The Simula language was developed by

Ole-Johan Dahl Ole-Johan Dahl (12 October 1931 – 29 June 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along w ...

and

Kristen Nygaard Kristen Nygaard (27 August 1926 – 10 August 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist, programming language pioneer, and politician. Internationally, Nygaard is acknowledged as the co-inventor of object-oriented programming and the programming ...

; it is widely considered to be the first example of an

object-oriented programming language 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 ...

; Simula also introduced the concept of

coroutine Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative ...

s. * In 1964,

Peter Landin Peter John Landin (5 June 1930 – 3 June 2009) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of bo ...

is the first to realize Church's lambda calculus can be used to model programming languages. He introduces the

SECD machine The SECD machine is a highly influential (''see: '') virtual machine and abstract machine intended as a target for functional programming language compilers. The letters stand for Stack, Environment, Control, Dump—the internal registers of the mac ...

which "interprets" lambda expressions. * In 1965, Landin introduces the

J operator In computer science, Peter Landin's J operator is a programming construct that Function composition, post-composes a Lambda (programming), lambda expression with the continuation to the current lambda-context. The resulting “function” is first ...

, essentially a form of

continuation In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements ( reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computati ...

. * In 1966, Landin introduces

ISWIM ISWIM (acronym for If you See What I Mean) is an abstract computer programming language (or a family of languages) devised by Peter Landin and first described in his article "The Next 700 Programming Languages", published in the Communications ...

, an abstract computer

in his article ''The Next 700 Programming Languages''. It is influential in the design of languages leading to the

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 lan ...

programming language. * In 1966,

Corrado Böhm Corrado Böhm (17 January 1923 – 23 October 2017) was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and a computer scientist known especially for his contributions to the theory of structured programming, constructive mathem ...

introduced the programming language CUCH (Curry-Church). * In 1967,

Christopher Strachey Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al. ...

publishes his influential set of lecture notes ''

Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages ''Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages'' were an influential set of lecture notes written by Christopher Strachey for the International Summer School in Computer Programming at Copenhagen in August, 1967. It introduced much programming l ...

'', introducing the terminology '' R-values'', '' L-values'', ''

parametric polymorphism In programming languages and type theory, parametric polymorphism allows a single piece of code to be given a "generic" type, using variables in place of actual types, and then instantiated with particular types as needed. Parametrically polymorph ...

'', and ''

ad hoc polymorphism In programming languages, ad hoc polymorphismC. StracheyFundamental concepts in programming languages Lecture notes for International Summer School in Computer Programming, Copenhagen, August 1967 is a kind of polymorphism in which polymorphic f ...

''. * In 1969, J. Roger Hindley publishes ''The Principal Type-Scheme of an Object in Combinatory Logic'', later generalized into the Hindley–Milner

type inference Type inference refers to the automatic detection of the type of an expression in a formal language. These include programming languages and mathematical type systems, but also natural languages in some branches of computer science and linguistics ...

algorithm. * In 1969,

Tony Hoare Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare) (born 11 January 1934) is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and ...

introduces the

Hoare logic Hoare logic (also known as Floyd–Hoare logic or Hoare rules) is a formal system with a set of logical rules for reasoning rigorously about the correctness of computer programs. It was proposed in 1969 by the British computer scientist and log ...

, a form of axiomatic semantics. * In 1969,

William Alvin Howard William Alvin Howard (born 1926) is a proof theorist best known for his work demonstrating formal similarity between intuitionistic logic and the simply typed lambda calculus that has come to be known as the Curry–Howard correspondence. He has a ...

observed that a "high-level"

proof system In mathematical logic, a proof calculus or a proof system is built to prove statements. Overview A proof system includes the components: * Language: The set ''L'' of formulas admitted by the system, for example, propositional logic or first-order ...

, referred to as

natural deduction In logic and proof theory, natural deduction is a kind of proof calculus in which logical reasoning is expressed by inference rules closely related to the "natural" way of reasoning. This contrasts with Hilbert-style systems, which instead use ax ...

, can be directly interpreted in its

intuitionistic In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of f ...

version as a typed variant of the

model of computation In computer science, and more specifically in computability theory and computational complexity theory, a model of computation is a model which describes how an output of a mathematical function is computed given an input. A model describes how ...

known as

. This became known as the

Curry–Howard correspondence In programming language theory and proof theory, the Curry–Howard correspondence (also known as the Curry–Howard isomorphism or equivalence, or the proofs-as-programs and propositions- or formulae-as-types interpretation) is the direct relati ...

1970s

* In 1970,

Dana Scott Dana Stewart Scott (born October 11, 1932) is an American logician who is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University; he is now retired and lives in Berkeley, Ca ...

first publishes his work on denotational semantics. * In 1972,

logic programming Logic programming is a programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic. Any program written in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic pro ...

and

Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily ...

were developed thus allowing computer programs to be expressed as mathematical logic. * A team of scientists at

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

led by

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...

develop

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

, an object-oriented language widely known for its innovative development environment. * In 1974,

John C. Reynolds John Charles Reynolds (June 1, 1935 – April 28, 2013) was an American computer scientist. Education and affiliations John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in theoretical physics from Harvard U ...

discovers

System F System F (also polymorphic lambda calculus or second-order lambda calculus) is a typed lambda calculus that introduces, to simply typed lambda calculus, a mechanism of universal quantification over types. System F formalizes parametric polymorph ...

. It had already been discovered in 1971 by the mathematical logician

Jean-Yves Girard Jean-Yves Girard (; born 1947) is a French logician working in proof theory. He is the research director ( emeritus) at the mathematical institute of the University of Aix-Marseille, at Luminy. Biography Jean-Yves Girard is an alumnus of the ...

. * From 1975,

Gerald Jay Sussman Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. ...

and

Guy Steele 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 ...

develop the

Scheme programming language Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp family of programming languages. Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman, via a series of memos now known as the Lambda Papers. It ...

, a Lisp dialect incorporating

lexical scoping In computer programming, the scope of a name binding (an association of a name to an entity, such as a variable) is the part of a program where the name binding is valid; that is, where the name can be used to refer to the entity. In other parts o ...

, a unified namespace, and elements from the actor model including first-class

s. * Backus, at the 1977

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...

lecture, assailed the current state of industrial languages and proposed a new class of programming languages now known as

function-level programming In computer science, function-level programming refers to one of the two contrasting programming paradigms identified by John Backus in his work on programs as mathematical objects, the other being value-level programming. In his 1977 Turing ...

languages. * In 1977,

Gordon Plotkin Gordon David Plotkin, (born 9 September 1946) is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and h ...

introduces Programming Computable Functions, an abstract typed functional language. * In 1978,

Robin Milner Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010), known as Robin Milner or A. J. R. G. Milner, was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.

introduces the Hindley–Milner type inference algorithm for ML.

Type theory In mathematics, logic, and computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system, and in general type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a foundat ...

became applied as a discipline to programming languages, this application has led to tremendous advances in type theory over the years.

1980s

* In 1981,

publishes his paper on structured operational semantics. * In 1988,

Gilles Kahn Gilles Kahn (April 17, 1946 – February 9, 2006) was a French computer scientist. He notably introduced Kahn process networks as a model for parallel processing and natural semantics for describing the operational semantics of programming l ...

published his paper on

natural semantics Operational semantics is a category of formal programming language semantics in which certain desired properties of a program, such as correctness, safety or security, are verified by constructing proofs from logical statements about its execu ...

. * There emerged

process calculi In computer science, the process calculi (or process algebras) are a diverse family of related approaches for formally modelling concurrent systems. Process calculi provide a tool for the high-level description of interactions, communications, and ...

, such as the Calculus of Communicating Systems of

Robin Milner Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010), known as Robin Milner or A. J. R. G. Milner, was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.

, and the

Communicating sequential processes In computer science, communicating sequential processes (CSP) is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It is a member of the family of mathematical theories of concurrency known as process algebras, or ...

model of C. A. R. Hoare, as well as similar models of concurrency such as the actor model of

Carl Hewitt Carl Eddie Hewitt () is an American computer scientist who designed the Planner programming language for automated planningCarl Hewitt''PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots''IJCAI. 1969. and the actor model of concurrent computing, ...

. * In 1985, the release of Miranda sparks an academic interest in lazy-evaluated pure functional programming languages. A committee was formed to define an open standard resulting in the release of the Haskell 1.0 standard in 1990. *

Bertrand Meyer Bertrand Meyer (; ; born 21 November 1950) is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He created the Eiffel programming language and the idea of design by contract. Education and academic career Meyer recei ...

created the methodology Design by contract and incorporated it into the

Eiffel programming language Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer (an object-orientation proponent and author of '' Object-Oriented Software Construction'') and Eiffel Software. Meyer conceived the language in 1985 with the goal of i ...

1990s

Gregor Kiczales Gregor Kiczales is an American computer scientist. He is currently a full time professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is best known for developing the concept of aspect-orien ...

, Jim Des Rivieres and

Daniel G. Bobrow Daniel Gureasko Bobrow (29 November 1935 – 20 March 2017) was an American computer scientist who created an oft-cited artificial intelligence program STUDENT (computer program), STUDENT, with which he earned his PhD., worked at BBN Technologies ( ...

published the book ''

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol ''The Art of the Metaobject Protocol'' (AMOP) is a 1991 book by Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivieres, and Daniel G. Bobrow (all three working for Xerox PARC) on the subject of metaobject protocol. Overview The book contains an explanation of what ...

''. *

Eugenio Moggi Eugenio Moggi is a professor of computer science at the University of Genoa, Italy. He first described the general use of monads to structure programs. Biography Academic qualifications: * PhD in Computer Science, University of Edinburgh 19 ...

and

Philip Wadler Philip Lee Wadler (born April 8, 1956) is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory. He is the chair of Theoretical Computer Science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer ...

introduced the use of monads for structuring programs written in

Sub-disciplines and related fields

There are several fields of study which either lie within programming language theory, or which have a profound influence on it; many of these have considerable overlap. In addition, PLT makes use of many other branches of

, including

computability theory Computability theory, also known as recursion theory, is a branch of mathematical logic, computer science, and the theory of computation that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees. The field has since e ...

category theory Category theory is a general theory of mathematical structures and their relations that was introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane in the middle of the 20th century in their foundational work on algebraic topology. Nowadays, cate ...

, and

set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...

Formal semantics

Formal semantics is the formal specification of the behaviour of computer programs and programming languages. Three common approaches to describe the semantics or "meaning" of a computer program are denotational semantics,

operational semantics Operational semantics is a category of formal programming language semantics in which certain desired properties of a program, such as correctness, safety or security, are verified by constructing proofs from logical statements about its execut ...

and axiomatic semantics.

Type theory

Type theory is the study of

type system In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type to every "term" (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usually the terms are various constructs of a computer progra ...

s; which are "a tractable syntactic method for proving the absence of certain program behaviors by classifying phrases according to the kinds of values they compute".Benjamin C. Pierce. 2002
Types and Programming Languages
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Many programming languages are distinguished by the characteristics of their type systems.

Program analysis and transformation

Program analysis is the general problem of examining a program and determining key characteristics (such as the absence of classes of program errors). Program transformation is the process of transforming a program in one form (language) to another form.

Comparative programming language analysis

Comparative programming language analysis seeks to classify programming languages into different types based on their characteristics; broad categories of programming languages are often known as

programming paradigm Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on their features. Languages can be classified into multiple paradigms. Some paradigms are concerned mainly with implications for the execution model of the language, suc ...

Generic and metaprogramming

Metaprogramming Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself ...

is the generation of higher-order programs which, when executed, produce programs (possibly in a different language, or in a subset of the original language) as a result.

Domain-specific languages

Domain-specific language A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging f ...

s are languages constructed to efficiently solve problems of a particular part of domain.

Compiler construction

Compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

theory is the theory of writing ''compilers'' (or more generally, ''translators''); programs which translate a program written in one language into another form. The actions of a compiler are traditionally broken up into ''syntax analysis'' (

scan Scan may refer to: Acronyms * Schedules for Clinical Assessment in Neuropsychiatry (SCAN), a psychiatric diagnostic tool developed by WHO * Shared Check Authorization Network (SCAN), a database of bad check writers and collection agency for bad ...

ning and

parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from L ...

), ''semantic analysis'' (determining what a program should do), ''

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

'' (improving the performance of a program as indicated by some metric; typically execution speed) and '' code generation'' (generation and output of an equivalent program in some target language; often the

instruction set In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ' ...

of a CPU).

Run-time systems

Run-time systems refer to the development of programming language

runtime environment In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile t ...

s and their components, including

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

garbage collection Waste collection is a part of the process of waste management. It is the transfer of solid waste from the point of use and disposal to the point of treatment or landfill. Waste collection also includes the curbside collection of recyclabl ...

, and

foreign function interface A foreign function interface (FFI) is a mechanism by which a program written in one programming language can call routines or make use of services written in another. Naming The term comes from the specification for Common Lisp, which explicit ...

Journals, publications, and conferences

Conferences are the primary venue for presenting research in programming languages. The most well known conferences include the ''

Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages The annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) is an academic conference in the field of computer science, with focus on fundamental principles in the design, definition, analysis, and implementation of progr ...

'' (POPL), ''Programming Language Design and Implementation'' (PLDI), the ''

International Conference on Functional Programming The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) is an annual academic conference in the field of computer science sponsored by the ACM SIGPLAN, in association with IFIP Working Group 2.8 (Functional Programming). The con ...

'' (ICFP), ''the International Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications'' (OOPSLA) and ''the

International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems The International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) is an annual interdisciplinary computer science conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Reflecting its foc ...

'' (ASPLOS)''.'' Notable journals that publish PLT research include the ''

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems The ''ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems'' (''TOPLAS'') is a bimonthly, open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal on the topic of programming languages published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Background Publ ...

'' (TOPLAS), ''

Journal of Functional Programming The ''Journal of Functional Programming'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the design, implementation, and application of functional programming languages, spanning the range from mathematical theory to industrial practice. Topics ...

'' (JFP), ''

Journal of Functional and Logic Programming A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period *Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...

'', and ''

Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation ''Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation'' (formerly ''LISP and Symbolic Computation''; print: , online: ) was a computer science journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. It focuses on programming concepts and abstractions and program ...

''.

References

External links

{{Commons category
Lambda the Ultimate
a community weblog for professional discussion and repository of documents on programming language theory.
Great Works in Programming Languages
Collected by Benjamin C. Pierce (

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

).
Classic Papers in Programming Languages and Logic
Collected by Karl Crary (

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

).
Programming Language Research
Directory by Mark Leone.
λ-Calculus: Then & Now
by Dana S. Scott for the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration
Grand Challenges in Programming Languages
Panel session at

POPL The annual ACM SIGPLAN- SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) is an academic conference in the field of computer science, with focus on fundamental principles in the design, definition, analysis, and implementation of prog ...

2009.

History

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

Sub-disciplines and related fields

Formal semantics

Type theory

Program analysis and transformation

Comparative programming language analysis

Generic and metaprogramming

Domain-specific languages

Compiler construction

Run-time systems

Journals, publications, and conferences

See also

References

Further reading

External links