History of Programming Languages (conference)

U. S. scientific conference
a conference
History of Programming Languages (HOPL) is an infrequent ACM SIGPLAN 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 was held June 1 – 3, 1978 in Los Angeles, California. Jean E. Sammet 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 III was held June 9–10, 2007 in San Diego, California. 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): Object Oriented (Modula 2, Oberon, C++, Self, Emerald, and BETA), Functional (Haskell), Scripting (AppleScript, Lua), Reactive (Erlang, StateCharts), and Parallel (ZPL, High Performance Fortran). Each HOPL III paper describes the perspective of the creators of the language.

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 conference co chairs were Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel. The languages covered in this conference had to be widely adopted by 2011.