A few years ago I stumbled across a paper by one of my former classmates, Stephen Kell, titled “Some were meant for C: the endurance of an unmanageable language”. That was the first I’d heard of the Onward! Symposium on New Ideas in Programming and Reflections on Software at SPLASH/OOPSLA. Since then I’ve been sporadically picking my way through the proceedings, starting with the essays tracks and the Most Notable Paper Awards.

It’s an embarrassment of riches. A few of my favorites so far:

• “Designed as designer” and the 2019 response “Learning to listen for design”
• “Selfie and the basics”
• “The cuneiform tablets of 2015”
• “Notes on postmodern programming”
• “I throw itching powder at tulips”
• “Towards a theory of conceptual design for software”
• “The left hand of equals”
• “Rubber ducks, nightmares, and unsaturated predicates: proto-scientific schemata are good for agile”