History of Programming Languages (conference)
HOPL (History of Programming Languages) is a regular ACM SIGPLAN conference - regular, as in once every 15 years or so.
HOPL I was held June 1-3, 1979 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 Jean 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 reamined 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. The languages (and speakers) included in HOPL-I were:
- ALGOL 60 - Alan J. Perlis and Peter Naur
- APL - Adin D. Falkoff and Kenneth E. Iverson
- APT - Douglas T. Ross
- BASIC - Thomas E. Kurtz
- COBOL - Jean E. Sammet
- FORTRAN - John Backus
- GPSS - Geoffrey Gordon
- JOSS - Charles L. Baker
- JOVIAL - Jules I. Schwartz
- LISP - John McCarthy
- PL/I - George Radin
- SIMULA - Kristen Nygaard
- SNOBOL - Ralph E. Griswold
Preprints of the proceedings were published in "SIGPLAN Notices", volume 13, number8, 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 Richard L. Wexelblat. Academic press, 1981.