HaPoP 2018

Fourth Symposium on the History and Philosophy of Programming

23 March 2018, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Colocated with BSHM Meeting on History of Computing, 22 March 2018

More information

Event partners

Past events

Program committee

HaPoP4 co-chairs are Tomas Petricek and Ursula Martin. If you have any questions regarding suitability of a topic or format of the extended abstract, please contact Tomas at [email protected]. For quick questions, you can also use @tomaspetricek on Twitter.

  • Nicola Angius, Università di Sassari
  • Alan Blackwell, University of Cambridge
  • Edgar Daylight, Siegen University
  • Jeremy Gibbons, University of Oxford
  • Ursula Martin (co-chair), University of Oxford
  • Baptiste Mélès, Université de Lorraine
  • Liesbeth De Mol, Université de Lille
  • Tomas Petricek (co-chair), The Alan Turing Institue
  • Mark Priestley, The National Museum of Computing
  • Giuseppe Primiero, Middlesex University London
  • Julian Rohrhuber, Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf
  • Viola Schiaffonati, Politecnico di Milano
  • Guglielmo Tamburrini, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

Call for papers

The call for papers for HaPoP 2018 is now closed. This page contains the original information from the call for papers for archival purposes. If you are interested in submitting to future editions of HaPoP and HaPoC symposia, please join HAPOC: Comission for the History and Philosophy of Computing and you'll receive announcements about future events.

Possible and in no way exclusive questions of relevance to this symposium are:

  • Are we getting better at writing programs that solve the given problem?
  • Is programming a specialist discipline, or will everyone in the future be a programmer?
  • What are the different scientific paradigms and research programmes developed through the history of computer programming?
  • Is it possible to eliminate errors from computer programs?
  • What is a program? How did the notion of a program change throughout the history?
  • How are programs and abstractions born, used and understood?
  • What was and is the relationship between hardware and software developments?
  • How did theoretical computer science (lambda-calculus, logics, category theory) influence the development of programming languages and vice versa?
  • Is programming a science, engineering, technology and/or art?
  • What are the novel and most interesting approaches to the design of programs?
  • What is a correct program? Historical and philosophical reflections on issues in formal specification, type checking and model checking.
  • What is the nature of the relationship between algorithms and programs?
  • What legal and socio-economical issues are involved in the creation, patenting and free-distribution of programs?
  • How do we understand the multi-faceted nature of programs combining syntax, semantics and physical implementation?
  • How is programming to be taught?

Dates, format and submissions

For the symposium, we invite submission of two-page extended abstracts (including footnotes, but excluding references). Accepted papers will be given a 30 minute presentation slot including discussion.

We intend to submit a proposal for a special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews journal and publish selected paper in the journal following the symposium.