
SIGPLAN and Climate Change: A Look Back and a Look Forward
The SIGPLAN Climate Committee was active 2016-2020. Its members look back on the committee’s goals and achievements, and ahead at what is still to do.
The SIGPLAN Climate Committee was active 2016-2020. Its members look back on the committee’s goals and achievements, and ahead at what is still to do.
After COVID, what do we want our conferences to look like? We will examine some options and ask you to fill out a survey.
SIGPLAN-M is a new international long-term mentoring program for aspiring and current PL researchers. Get a sense of what it’s about through the stories of one of our fantastic mentors.
Programming languages papers often talk about usability advantages, but the evaluation sections of these papers tend to focus on performance or semantic guarantees. What if we applied methods from user-centric research to choosing problems and evaluating solutions in PL?
PL research is as consequential as ever; how can we make it more impactful? I suggest three ways: (1) expand the tent and lower the barriers to entering it; (2) venture outside the tent, taking PL knowledge and ideas to other communities, to address their problems; and (3) join or organize collaborative efforts attacking substantial problems, such as deployable AI or a quantum programming stack, the solution to which involves PL techniques, but many others besides.
The History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference is the most paradoxical that SIGPLAN puts on: the hardest to publish in, yet an acceptance rate of almost 100%. This post is the story of HOPL IV (2020).