Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/History of Programming Languages

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. And move to History of Programming Languages (conference). The relevance of the sources provided by Djm-leighpark remains uncontested. Sandstein 08:46, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

History of Programming Languages

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Not notable organization. Extremely outdated and full of jargon. De-prodding comment seems to have nothing to do with the notability or lack thereof. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 01:37, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 01:37, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

ACM and IEEE Computer Society are the two top Computer Science professional societies in the world. ACM sponsors HOPL through its SIGPLAN special interest group. SIGPLAN sponsors most of the top professonal conferences in Programming Languages. I guess one could argue ACM is "not notable organization", but ACM sponsors the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize in CS. HOPL has indeed been an unusual conference series, it mixes CS professionals with historians to provide first-hand histories of some of the most important artifacts in our modern world. Some of the language names sound like jargon, but they form the foundation of everything that is computer/internet related. The material is not "out of date", but I did update the final presentation date of HOPL IV. Deleting this page will not destroy the history of these foundational technologies, but it will make it harder for new students of computers and history to find them. N2cjn (talk) 02:28, 9 January 2022 (UTC)n2cjn[reply]

Delete: The UMN archives source provides useful information on the scope of the event. But there is no indication of notability or significance, based on the journal articles. Additionally, conferences of this kind tend to have at least a few reliable, independent sources from mass news media. Multi7001 (talk) 02:32, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. No independent in-depth sources, no article... In addition, including the whole line-up of speakers is undue, such information belongs on the conference's own website. --Randykitty (talk) 09:26, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: in the unlikely event this survives AfD, move to HOPL, which is currently the redirect, as it's extremely confusing to readers to have two articles that differ only by the capitalisation of middle-words, this article looking very much as though it's going to talk about the legitimate subject matter of the other, History of programming languages. If there's a serious risk that readers will fail to search for HOPL, put a hat-note on the legitimate article. Elemimele (talk) 12:50, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
~~Delete~~: While it's excellent that this conference happens, it appears not to be of sufficient notability for inclusion, failing WP:GNG. Chumpih ^t 19:34, 9 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and move I'm swayed by De Guerre's enthusiastic comments. Chumpih ^t 18:01, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Strong keep, move ~~to HOPL~~ and clean up. It's impossible to under-state how big a deal HOPL is, in the programming language community. I don't think we have a rule on how notable a conference has to be, but this one should easily pass WP:GNG on citation count alone. It's a very unusual conference, because it only happens every 15 or so years. Papers are invitation-only, and merely being asked to submit is a huge honour. Unfortunately, you wouldn't know any of this from the article. De Guerre (talk) 00:42, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Unfortunately, your !vote just seems to be a strong case of WP:ILIKEIT. Are there any reliable sources that are independent of the subject that discuss it in-depth? And moving to "HOPL" is not a good idea, we don't use initialisms as article titles. --Randykitty (talk) 09:31, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Apart from hundreds of citations to papers presented, as is usual for anything of this level of significance in a given field, I don't know what would constitute RS for an academic conference. What independent sources discuss, in depth, Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, or Computational Complexity Conference, or North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics? This is an honest question, because I don't believe WP has guidelines or a policy on this. The only think I can think of is that the truly significant conferences get reported in other journals of the field by different publishers (e.g. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing [1]). De Guerre (talk) 12:26, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment The nomination refers to HOPL as an "organization". Even at the time of nomination, the article clearly stated it is a conference. Assuming good faith, perhaps nom genuinely misunderstood what the article is actually about? De Guerre (talk) 12:35, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Additional comment On further reflection, I agree with Randykitty that "HOPL" is not a good rename. History of Programming Languages (conference) would be much better. De Guerre (talk) 07:58, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep (plus rename to something else): per De Guerre and note I also agree with the rename. Observe the nom. is slagging off my dePROD because of failure to understand and zooms off to AfD without asking to make the snide comment without apparent careful checking of his nom. There are sources out there: "Nofre, D., Priestley, M., & Alberts, G. (2014). When technology became language: The origins of the linguistic conception of computer programming, 1950-1960. Technology and Culture, 55(1), 40-75"; "King, K. N. (1993). The history of programming languages. Dr.Dobb's Journal, 18(8), 18."; "Reviews. (1984). Annals of the History of Computing, 6(1), 74-80. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.1984.10004"; "Azad, A., & Smith, D. T. (2014). A debate over the teaching of a legacy programming language in an information technology (IT) program. Journal of Information Technology Education.Innovations in Practice, 13, 111-127. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.28945/2088"; "Sammet, J. E. (2000). The real creators of cobol. IEEE Software, 17(2), 30-32. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/52.841602" .... Thankyou. Djm-leighpark (talk) 08:54, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Not sure what good the rename would do, but if that is what it takes... W Nowicki (talk) 00:06, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 07:20, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and move - Notability established by amount of citations found on google scholar. I support renaming it to HOPL, which seems to be the way it's referred to in the quick scan I gave of the academic papers anyway, but I would not mind History of Programming Languages (conference) if other editors feel that would be better. Fieari (talk) 07:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I would also be equally happy with History of Programming Languages (conference) instead of HOPL if preferred. The reason for the reaname, W Nowicki is that an article already exists entitled History of programming languages, which is about (unsurprisingly) the history of programming languages! Elemimele (talk) 13:03, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep and rename to History of Programming Languages (conference) with a aka note at the top of the page itself.Gusfriend (talk) 02:13, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.