History of Programming Languages (HOPL) is an infrequent

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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 o ...

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

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. Jean E. Sammet was both the general and program committee chair. John A. N. Lee was the administrative chair.

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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

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. 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

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and Richard G. Gibson (Addison Wesley, 1996).

HOPL III

HOPL III was held June 9–10, 2007 in

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and

Barbara G. Ryder Barbara G. Ryder is an American Computer Scientist noted for her research on programming languages and more specifically, the theoretical foundations and empirical investigation of interprocedural compile-time analysis. Biography Ryder received ...

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 ...

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 ...

(

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 ...

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, C++,

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, Emerald, and

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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 s ...

(

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 ...

), Scripting (

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), Reactive ( Erlang, StateCharts), and

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( ZPL, High Performance Fortran). 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

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. 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.

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, ...