Blog

In the last few years, the Computability in Europe Conference Series has hosted a Special Session on the History and Philosophy of Computing, organised in concert with the HaPoC Commission. The next CiE Conference will take place at the University of Paris 7, France. Also in this occasion, the HaPoC Commission has been asked to organise a Special Session and two colleagues have accepted to be in charge of selecting the Speakers for this event. We are now very pleased to announce the Organisers for the HaPoC Special Session at Cie2016:

On Tuesday 21 October 2014, the HaPoC Commission Council composed by Liesbeth de Mol, Giuseppe Primiero, Benedikt Loewe, Raymond Turner, Helena Durnova and gerard Alberts met in London. This was our annual Council meeting.

The discussion was focused on the present and the future of HaPoC, and its activities. In particular, the Council has considered:

HaPoC is organising a new Special Session on History and Philosophy of Computing at the CiE2015 Evolving Computability Conference, to be held in Bucharest, Romania from June 29th to July 3rd. This new event will be organised by Marco Benini (University of Insubria) and Christine Proust (CNRS & Université Paris Diderot). The community is very grateful for their help in setting up this new Special Session and we are looking forward for a new exciting programme!

When I was a programmer, and even when I was a teacher of programming, I would wonder about where data structures and algorithms came from, and to what extent people use pass-by-value, pass-by-reference, and pass-by-name for communication in daily life, and whether we use those techniques for activities besides communication, and whether the universe somehow uses those techniques, and about many other speculative questions. Now those questions attract me to the philosophy of computer science.