HaPoP 2022

Fifth Symposium on the History and Philosophy of Programming

13 June 2022, Lille, France

Maison Européenne des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société

Co-located with the final conference of the ANR-funded PROGRAMme project.

More information

Past events

Associated with

Program committee

HaPoP5 co-chairs are Liesbeth De Mol and Tomas Petricek. If you have any questions regarding suitability of a topic or format of the extended abstract, please contact Liesbeth at [email protected] or Tomas at [email protected]. For quick questions, you can also use @tomaspetricek on Twitter.

  • Arnaud Bailly, Aleryo
  • Martin Carlé, Ionean University, Corfu
  • Liesbeth De Mol (co-chair), CNRS, UMR 8163 STL, Université de Lille
  • Andrea Magnorsky, Independent
  • Ursula Martin, University of Oxford
  • Tomas Petricek (co-chair), University of Kent
  • Mark Priestley, National Museum of Computing, Bletchley
  • Giuseppe Primiero, University of Milan

Call for papers

In order to open up the ongoing work on the PROGRAMme project, initiate new collaborations that critically reflect on the nature of programs and engage a broader community with the above issues, HaPoP 2022 is particularly looking for talk proposals that relate to the question “What is a computer program?” and offer a novel reflection from a variety of perspectives, including historical, practice-based, philosophical, logical, etc.

Selected topics of interest for the symposium

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

  • What is a computer program?
  • 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?
  • What is a correct program?
  • Is a program a text?
  • Is it possible to eliminate errors from computer programs?
  • 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?
  • What are the novel and most interesting approaches to the design of programs?
  • 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.

Special journal issue

Following the symposium, we will organize a special issue of the open access Computational Culture journal. Authors will be invited to submit full papers based on their presentation to be peer reviewed and considered for publication in the special issue.

Important dates

  • Submission deadline: 18 March 2022
  • Author notification: 15 April 2022
  • HaPoP symposium: 13 June 2022

Important links

  • Submission web site: HaPoP5 on EasyChair
  • Financial support: Coming soon
  • Registraton site: Coming soon