The HaPoP symposium series focuses on the contributions on the history and philosophy of programming broadly understood, whether conceptual concerns or practical matters, field-specific examinations or cross-disciplinary comparisons, as well as, but not limited to, epistemic, aesthetic and ethical reflections.
The idea is to complement the bi-yearly HaPoC multi-day conference focusing on computation as a broad object of inquiry with a one-day symposium on its practical counterpart: programming. This perspective on the historical and philosophical dimension of programming provides a space for inquiring into the concrete reality of computation, but also to maintain productive exchanges among members of the research community.
Just like its parent conference, HaPoC, the initial impetus for this series was to invite philosophers and historians of computation to mutually reinforce each other’s disciplinary perspectives; over more than a decade of HaPoP installments, the disciplinary reach has grown to further enrich discussions on what programming is, what it can do, who does it, and how it changes, or remains the same, over time.
HaPoP is usually a single-day event (sometimes taking place as two half-day events) featuring a dozen of contributions, organized in ad-hoc thematic panels. A specific theme is chosen for every edition. For the last three editions, the main question were “What is critical about programming?” and “Fairness and Bias in the History and Philosophy of Programming”, and “What is a Program?”, the latter taking place within the scope of the ANR project PROGRAMme.