by Alex Potanin on Jul 20, 2026 | Tags: ACM, conference budgets, conference organization, programming languages, registration fees, SIGPLAN, student travel grants, transparency
SIGPLAN runs on a simple arithmetic: around $2M USD a year in conference registration income from POPL, PLDI, ICFP, and SPLASH/OOPSLA must cover the conferences themselves, some $300K in annual community support (PLMW, PAC travel funding, summer schools, and awards), and new student presenter travel grants — all while keeping the reserve ACM requires. In this post, the SIGPLAN Treasurer explains where the money comes from, why conferences ran at a loss for five years after COVID, how the new $300-per-day registration target was set, and what it all means for the PL community.
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by Roman Elizarov on May 19, 2022 | Tags: compilers, kotlin, language design, programming languages
Real programming languages are living things, changing and evolving. As with any production code, most of their designer’s time is spent on bug fixing and small improvements, rather than on the radical new features. One of the unique things about Kotlin is that it has been evolving in the use-case and community-driven fashion for years, starting way before it went to the stable 1.0 release in 2016, even for some time before it went public in 2011. Language design in the real world is a maintenance of a complex system and it runs into novel research questions with respect to type systems, feature interactions, usability, real-life code patterns in big code, etc.
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by Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel on Jun 25, 2020 | Tags: history, programming languages, review process
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).
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