Talk:Programming language theory

Actor model and process calculi
I have rephrased the mention of Hewitt's Actor model and the process calculi, since, User:CarlHewitt has made it pretty clear at Actor model and process calculi that he considers them to be quite different animals. --Allan McInnes 06:53, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

PL conferences and journals
I fixed up the section on PLT conferences and journals. It made the following mistakes:
 * it claimed that ICFP was more well known than PLDI (PLDI is generally considered a more prestigious venue -- it has a lower acceptance rate and articles from it are cited more often)
 * it listed journals first, and said "sometimes conferences are given a leading role." Conferences are the primary venues to publish PLT research. The journal I would mention is ACM TOPLAS, but I left all of them in except the random Computation Systems & Structures one that I've never heard of and didn't have a Wikipedia article.
 * It said significant research papers might be published in JACM, I&C, or Theoretical Computer Science. Nobody in PL reads JACM or I&C for PL articles, and the only noteworthy PL article I've seen in I&C was the paper on the pi-calculus. Theoretical Computer Science isn't as prestigious as ACM TOPLAS, so that's a weird claim to make as well.

The original section didn't include many references, and I didn't add any for now. What would be an appropriate way to source these claims? For the conferences vs journals, I could provide citation statistics and acceptance rates, but I don't know what would be appropriate.Christopher Monsanto (talk) 18:42, 5 February 2011 (UTC)


 * I think ICFP is better known in the functional programming/Haskell community, but these things are indeed part of the folklore and difficult to cite. I wouldn't be surprised if the ACM published an overview articles on the conferences in the field once in while. —Ruud 10:46, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Intro Paragraph
I'm not much of a Wikipedia editor so not sure what the protocol for editing a page is, but I'm almost positive the sentence "Most undergraduate computer science programs require coursework in the topic." is inaccurate. What's the process of having it removed (I assume if I just edit it out someone would put it back)? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.102.2.196 (talk) 08:51, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

PL versus PLT
In my experience, the term "PLT" is almost never used to refer to the field of programming languages in general. PLT is almost always used to refer to Felleisen's PLT group, responsible for PLT Racket. The science in general is just called "PL." 98.245.82.155 (talk) 07:14, 28 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I partially agree, inside academia this is quite often simply referred to as "Programming languages", however it still has a much more specific meaning than that term would have outside of academia. —Ruud 11:55, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Simula did not introduce coroutine
The statement "Simula also introduced the concept of coroutines." I believe is wrong. It may be the first high level language to do so. But the Honeywell H200 computer implemented coroutines in hardware with the CSM instruction. And from other information on Simule it was SIMULA II that introduced coroutines in 1967. Steamerandy (talk) 17:15, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

History - John MacCarthy's Lisp is not Lambda Calculus based
John MacCarthy just borrowed the term lambda for anonymous function.

"c. To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the λ-notation of Church (1941). I didn’t understand the rest of his book, so I wasn’t tempted to try to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions. Church used higher order functionals instead of using conditional expressions. Conditional expressions are much more readily implemented on computers."

- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.52.0.235 (talk) 13:28, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

History - Edsger W. Dijkstra and structured programming
I would consider Dijkstra's advocacy of structured program decomposition an important development in the theory of programming languages. 46.132.4.130 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 08:30, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Last 30 years ...
When reading the article, it kind of looks the development stops in the 90's. Also the _talks_ are quite old; the last 10 years no real new topics are added -- only few details as who/when introduced things in the past.

Is there really no development in the academic world on this juvenile topic (NO), is it not added (possible), or is the topic old-fashioned (probably). ALbertMietus (talk) 19:50, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

A branch of Computer Science, but more specifically "Theoretical Computer Science"
PLT is a branch of computer science, but "theoretical computer science". It's another layer/category lower, however it still fall under the same umbrella.

I feel like readers would appreciate that accurate distinction. Or I could be wrong, so I haven't officially edited it myself yet. Ejenriquez (talk) 01:21, 1 January 2023 (UTC)