History of Programming Languages — Collection of Students’ Essays

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2021-06-15 23:30:08

This Spring, Anya Helene Bagge and myself have given a special seminar course on History of Programming Languages at University of Bergen, Norway.

At each class, a student or a team of two students presented a paper from The Fourth ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference a.k.a. HOPL IV, to be held in June 2021. HOPL is a rare event, held once every ~15 years (previous editions: 1978, 1993, 2007).

The students of our course hav e presented HOPL IV papers on history of the following programming languages: APL, Clojure, D, F#, Groovy, JavaScript, Logo, S & R, and Standard ML.

The presentations on three languages from HOPL IV were given virtually at our course by the corresponding HOPL IV papers’ (co)author(s): Bjarne Stroustrup talked about history of C++ (the talk was organized in cooperation with University of Turku, Finland), John Reid presented history of Fortran (announcement), and Peter Van Roy gave a talk on history of Oz (announcement).

To document our students’ learning experiences with this course, we asked them to prepare a short essay summarizing the HOPL IV paper they have read and presented.