HOPL-II - Cambridge, MA - 20-23 April 1993

In order to appreciate the papers presented at HOPL-II and the accompanying Forum on the History of Computing, it is important to understand how the program was developed.  Three fundamental decisions were made at the beginning:

1. 1.there would be invited and contributed papers,
   

2. 2.the scope of the conference would include papers on the early history of specific languages--as in the first HOPL conferencen and papers on (a) evolution of a language, (b) history of language features and concepts, and (c) classes of languages for application-oriented languages and paradigm-oriented languages,
   

3. 3.the conference was not intended to honor anyone.
   

For the invited speakers, the Program Committee used the same types of criteria used for the first HOPL conference, as indicated in the preceding section, but changed the cutoff date to require that "preliminary ideas about the language were documented by 1982 and the language was in use or being taught by 1985." We issued six invitations for people to prepare papers because these languages met the three indicated criteria, that is, compliance with the date, were still in use, and had influence on the computing field):

1. •Aiain Colmerauer - Prolog
   

2. •Jean Ichbiah - Ada (technical development)
   

3. •Alan Kay - Smalltalk
   

4. •Dennis Ritchie - C
   

5. •William Whitaker - Ada (project management)
   

6. •Niklaus Wirth - Pascal
   
   

Each of these people was deemed a key person in the early development of the language; all of them accepted the invitation/request to prepare detailed papers, but subsequently Jean Ichbiah was unable to prepare a paper within the specified conference schedule due to the pressure of other responsibilities and withdrew his participation.

A call for papers was issued in December of 1990 with notification to potential authors that their papers would go through two rounds of refereeing with a major rewrite probably needed between them.

A keynote address "Language Design as Design" was presented by Fred Brooks.

HOPL-II was sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN.