If you're interested in this kind of thing, definitely also check out the upcoming HOPL conference -- co-located (whatever that means for a virtual conference) with PLDI this June. Matthias was on the program committee, along with a bunch of other PL OGs.
Looking at the talks/papers from 1978 is a trip: Grace Hopper gave the keynote, and there were talks by legends like Backus, Naur, Liskov, Kurtz, and McCarthy.
There are transcripts available of all of the talks as well as Q&A sessions and the like -- really fascinating to look back on now with the benefit of hindsight.
For example, McCarthy was asked [1] whether he believed "that LISP has made any long-lasting contributions to the more 'normal' programming languages, e.g., FORTRAN and ALGOL, COBOL, etc."
He responded that, yes, he thought conditional expressions and recursion were here to stay. Safe to say he was right about that!
"1970 - Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman create Scheme. Their work leads to a series of "Lambda the Ultimate" papers culminating in "Lambda the Ultimate Kitchen Utensil." This paper becomes the basis for a long running, but ultimately unsuccessful run of late night infomercials. Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them."
As a Haskeller, I feel obliged to say that that is a parody. A self-parody, perhaps, but a parody nonetheless. In reality, the vast majority of Haskellers (including me!) wouldn’t have a clue what that sentence means — but we’re content to use monads nonetheless, because having a knowledge of the category theory underlying monads is unnecessary if you just want to use them in Haskell.
"1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular[1]. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"[2]."
Seems only meniton of Snobol is in the comments. Hard to ignore it because Snobol was the first to use associative arrays ("tables"). Awk copied this, then Perl, etc. I do not use Python. I love Snobol because it has an assembly-like feel to it. Much faster than Python.
He's been speaking English a long time (despite choosing the dot paper instead of squares) -- as a native English speaker myself those were pretty clear to read. It is interesting that he has apparently abandoned the German letterform handwriting (at least in English).
I assume his students are ver comfortable in English as well.
These are the slides for the lecture "Programming Languages and Operating Systems" by PhD student Lucy Amidon. I think they are probably by her, and not by Felleisen. The other lectures with a byline have other distinct styles.
In PL academia (including in the US) many people prefer dot paper for physical research notebooks. When you're mixing together diagrams, prose, inference rules, semantics, code, etc. it's a quite nice and flexible medium.
It feels too academic that none of popular new programming languages is mentioned in the "lectures" page, although it refers not only classics but relatively new papers.
Then went back to the top page:
... The intended audience consists of PhD students who will write a dissertation in the area ...
Website: https://hopl4.sigplan.org Papers: https://dl.acm.org/toc/pacmpl/2020/4/HOPL