Free ACM Programming Language Articles

[mfleming]

I ran across a posting about freely downloadable articles from the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, History of Programming Languages (HOPL IV) conference. The HOPL conference is held about every 14 years, but this fourth one was not held due to Covid-19. The ACM made the conference papers freely available. The papers cover such topics as APL, Javascript, Logo, MATLAB, R, and Smalltalk. Likely something of passing interest for everyone. Here's the URL

https://dl.acm.org/toc/pacmpl/2020/4/HOPL

My interests were APL, Oz, and Verilog

Edit: I should note that these articles will only be available through June 30th, so get them while you can!

[Sylvain Cote]

Wow!
I have downloaded all the papers.
I have evaluated or professionally used more than half of the language listed.

I just started reading the Origins of the D Programming Language, I knew several facts, but to read it chronologically put things in perspective.
I have been following Walter Bright since I bought Zortech C++ in 1988 of which I still have the 5.25" floppy disks.
I had a first look at D (aka D1) in 2003 but the language was immature and only had a Win32 compiler.
I had a second look at D (aka D2) in 2011 for an embedded ARM Cortex-M project, the ARM compiler was barely working at that time so I end up using C++ instead. (Keil, Gnu ARM & LLVM ARM)
I will have a third look after my reading.

Thanks Mark,

Sylvain

[mfleming]

These are not the usual 10 or 15 page conference papers, but in some cases the articles exceed 100 pages, so they really tell the story behind the history of a given language. The one on Javascript sounds like a fun read about the early days of the World Wide Web (does anyone remember what www stands for? WAIS? Gopher? I have the t-shirt!)

The intro to D sounds like its author was quite talented. I want to track it down tomorrow. I remember Oz 1 from the mid 90's. Wrap your head around a language in which every single statement was concurrent. I'll wait . . . (hint: statements blocked until dependent references were bound)

I skipped only F# (Microsoft bleh!) and Objective C, but may go back for the latter. I can remember playing around with a NeXT machine.

[david sanz]

As of today, they are still downloadable

[StephenG1CMZ]

(07-04-2020 03:13 PM)david sanz Wrote:  As of today, they are still downloadable

That's confusing, given that as of today this forum labels your post as "Today" but doesn't give any insight as to when "today" is (or should I say "was"? ).
BTW other articles are (or were?) available from the ACM digital library, not only the HOPL topics.

[Jonathan Busby]

(06-29-2020 12:47 AM)mfleming Wrote:  I ran across a posting about freely downloadable articles from the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, History of Programming Languages (HOPL IV) conference. The HOPL conference is held about every 14 years, but this fourth one was not held due to Covid-19. The ACM made the conference papers freely available. The papers cover such topics as APL, Javascript, Logo, MATLAB, R, and Smalltalk. Likely something of passing interest for everyone. Here's the URL

https://dl.acm.org/toc/pacmpl/2020/4/HOPL

My interests were APL, Oz, and Verilog

Edit: I should note that these articles will only be available through June 30th, so get them while you can!

Thanks so much for the heads up!

I didn't notice this post for some reason but it seems that all the journal article content in PDF form is still freely available and downloadable ( And I just downloaded everything I could ) I'm especially interested in the history of Verilog article as I do all my hardware design in Verilog and SystemVerilog

Regards,

Jonathan

[rprosperi]

(07-04-2020 03:42 PM)StephenG1CMZ Wrote:  

(07-04-2020 03:13 PM)david sanz Wrote:  As of today, they are still downloadable

That's confusing, given that as of today this forum labels your post as "Today" but doesn't give any insight as to when "today" is (or should I say "was"? ).
BTW other articles are (or were?) available from the ACM digital library, not only the HOPL topics.

All posts are dated in the upper left corner. If you are reading a post on the same day it was written, the timestamp says "Today", otherwise it shows the date that the post was added.

[mfleming]

(07-04-2020 03:13 PM)david sanz Wrote:  As of today, they are still downloadable

Perhaps the web admin is on holiday

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(07-04-2020 10:36 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(07-04-2020 03:42 PM)StephenG1CMZ Wrote:  That's confusing, given that as of today this forum labels your post as "Today" but doesn't give any insight as to when "today" is (or should I say "was"? ).
BTW other articles are (or were?) available from the ACM digital library, not only the HOPL topics.

All posts are dated in the upper left corner. If you are reading a post on the same day it was written, the timestamp says "Today", otherwise it shows the date that the post was added.

And after one day it becomes "Yesterday"...
I thought we were accustomed enough to these calendar oddities. :-)

[rprosperi]

(07-05-2020 08:51 AM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  And after one day it becomes "Yesterday"...
I thought we were accustomed enough to these calendar oddities. :-)

I knew about "Today", but never noticed "Yesterday".

Not enough Beatles lately...