SIGPLAN is a special group within the Association for Computing Machinery that focuses on programming languages. This group studies programming language ideas and tools, including how they are designed, created, used, and understood. Members include people who develop programming languages, teach them, use them, research them, and study their theory.

Conferences

• Basic Ideas of Programming Languages (POPL)
• How to Create and Build Programming Languages (PLDI)
• Meeting About How Computers Handle Memory (ISMM)
• Tools for Specialized Computer Systems (LCTES)
• Meeting on Using Multiple Processors at Once (PPoPP)
• Meeting About a Type of Computer Code (ICFP)
• Making Software That Helps People (SPLASH)
• Using Objects in Computer Programs (OOPSLA)
• Past of Programming Languages (HOPL)
• Meeting About Changing Computer Languages (DLS)

Associated journals

• ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization
• ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
• Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Newsletters

• ACM SIGPLAN Notices – ISSN 1558-1160 ISSN 0362-1340. Available on the ACM website.
• Fortran Forum – ISSN 1061-7264 ISSN 1931-1311.
• Lisp Pointers (final issue 1995) – ISSN 1045-3563.
• OOPS Messenger (1990–1996) – ISSN 1558-0253 ISSN 1055-6400.

Awards

This award honors individuals who have made important and long-lasting contributions to the field of programming languages.

• 2025: Martin Odersky
• 2024: Keshav Pingali
• 2023: Kathryn S. McKinley
• 2022: Xavier Leroy
• 2021: Bob Harper
• 2020: Hans-J. Boehm
• 2019: Alex Aiken
• 2017: Thomas W. Reps
• 2016: Simon Peyton Jones
• 2015: Luca Cardelli
• 2014: Neil D. Jones
• 2013: Patrick Cousot and Radhia Cousot
• 2012: Matthias Felleisen
• 2011: Tony Hoare
• 2010: Gordon Plotkin
• 2009: Rod Burstall
• 2008: Barbara Liskov
• 2007: Niklaus Wirth
• 2006: Ron Cytron, Jeanne Ferrante, Barry K. Rosen, Mark Wegman, and Kenneth Zadeck
• 2005: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides
• 2004: John Backus
• 2003: John C. Reynolds
• 2002: John McCarthy
• 2001: Robin Milner
• 2000: Susan Graham
• 1999: Ken Kennedy
• 1998: Fran Allen
• 1997: Guy Steele

This award honors young researchers who have made outstanding contributions to programming languages. It is named after the computer scientist Robin Milner.

• 2025: Isil Dillig
• 2024: Armando Solar-Lezama
• 2023: Nate Foster
• 2022: Viktor Vafeiadis
• 2021: Emina Torlak
• 2020: Eran Yahav
• 2019: Martin Vechev
• 2018: Ranjit Jhala
• 2017: Derek Dreyer
• 2016: Stephanie Weirich
• 2015: David Walker
• 2014: Sumit Gulwani
• 2013: Lars Birkedal
• 2012: Shriram Krishnamurthi

This award is given to an institution or individual for creating a software system that has greatly influenced programming language research, tools, and implementations.

• 2025: Lean awarded to Gabriel Ebner, Soonho Kong, Leo de Moura, and Sebastian Ullrich.
• 2024: Rust awarded to Aaron Turon, Alex Crichton, Brian Anderson, Dave Herman, Felix S. Klock II, Graydon Hoare, Marijn Haverbeke, Nicholas D. Matsakis, Patrick Walton, Tim Chevalier, Yehuda Katz, and All Rust Contributors Past and Present
• 2023: OCaml awarded to David Allsopp, Florian Angeletti, Stephen Dolan, Damien Doligez, Alain Fritsch, Jacques Garrigue, Xavier Leroy, Anil Madhavapeddi, and others.
• 2022: Not listed in the original text.
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This award is given to the authors of a paper presented at PLDI 10 years before the award year, in recognition of its influence over the past decade.

• 2025 (for 2015): A Simpler, Safer Programming and Execution Model for Intermittent Systems by Brandon Lucia and Benjamin Ransford
• 2024 (for 2014): FlowDroid: Precise Context, Flow, Field, Object-sensitive and Lifecycle-aware Taint Analysis for Android Apps by Steven Arzt, Siegfried Rasthofer, Christian Fritz, Eric Bodden, Alexandre Bartel, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon, Damien Octeau, Patrick McDaniel
• 2023 (for 2013): Halide: A Language and Compiler for Optimizing Parallelism, Locality, and Representation in Image Processing Pipelines by Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Connelly Barnes, Andrew Adams, Sylvain Paris, Frédo Durand, and Saman Amarasinghe
• 2022 (for 2012): Test-Case Reduction for C Compiler Bugs by John Regehr, Yang Chen, Pascal Cuoq, Eric Eide, Chucky Ellison, Xuejun Yang
• 2021 (for 2011): Finding and Understanding Bugs in C Compilers by Xuejun Yang, Yang Chen, Eric Eide, and John Regehr
• 2020 (for 2010): Green: A Framework for Supporting Energy-Conscious Programming using Controlled Approximation by Woongki Baek and Trishul M. Chilimbi
• 2019 (for 2009): FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection by Cormac Flanagan and Stephen N. Freund
• 2018 (for 2008): A Practical Automatic Polyhedral Parallelizer and Locality Optimizer by Uday Bondhugula, Albert Hartono, J. Ramanujam, and P. Sadayappan
• 2017 (for 2007): Val