10 June 2007 - 14:40End of HOPL III

The History of Programming Languages conference is pretty neat because programming languages designers describe how they developed the language and reflect on how it has progressed. There have only been three of these conferences with the first being in 1978, so it was nice that I was able to attend and listen to all these important people.

Just last semester at UIUC, I was attending a dynamic language virtual machine seminar where we went through quite a few Self papers – all of them had David Ungar in the author list. And it turns out the Ungar was around to give a presentation and ask some questions at the panel at the end of the conference.

David Ungar asking questions for Larry Wall (far right, Perl guy) and Olin Shivers (middle, Scheme) about their goals for making programming languages