SPLASH is a new ACM SIGPLAN conference dedicated to the art and science of software development. Its first official instance was in October of 2010. SPLASH has its roots in OOPSLA, a long-standing research conference in Object-Oriented Programming.
In 1985 a group of 4 pioneers in object-oriented programming decided to plan and organize a North American conference on object-oriented programming systems. The group was Adele Goldberg, Tom Love, David Smith, and Allen Wirfs-Brock, and the conference was OOPSLA – Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications. The first OOPSLA was held at the Marriott Hotel in Portland, Oregon, in November 1986. About 600 people attended, about 50 papers were presented, and the attendees heard about Smalltalk, Lisp, Flavors, CommonLoops, Emerald, Trellis/Owl, Mach, Prolog, ABCL/1, prototypes, and distributed/concurrent programming from people like Danny Bobrow, Gregor Kiczales, Rick Rashid, Andrew Black, Dave Ungar, Henry Lieberman, Ralph Johnson, Dan Ingalls, Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, Ivar Jacobson, and Bertrand Meyer.
This wide range of topics and researchers set the tone for the conference, which became the forum for some of the most important software developments over the last couple of decades. OOPSLA was the incubator for CRC cards, CLOS, design patterns, Self, the agile methodologies, service-oriented architectures, wikis, Unified Modeling Language (UML), test driven design (TDD), refactoring, Java, dynamic compilation, and aspect-oriented programming, to name just some of them. Never only about objects but never straying far from them, the conference grew from 600 attendees to around 2500 at its peak, and is still strong at around 1300 even after spawning off a series of patterns conferences, Eclipse and EclipseCon, the Agile conference, and AOSD.
Toward the end of the 1990s – in the wake of successes by Smalltalk and Java in business and C++ in engineering – OO went mainstream, and OOPSLA transitioned from a conference that worked at making OO practical and understandable to one that works at the problems of a changing computing world, both by devising new techniques and technologies and by extending and expanding theory. What has remained unchanged is a passion for innovation and a habit of building communities.
In the early 2000's, many people in the OOPSLA community felt that OOPSLA would benefit from a new track publishing papers focused on innovative ideas beyond OO, and on forms of papers that normally wouldn't be accepted at OOPSLA. Speerheaded by Richard Gabriel, Onward! was born. Onward! was the first effort among ACM-sponsored conferences to give voice to "idea papers" within a framework of academic acceptability. Many other conferences have followed suit.
By the mid 2000's it was clear that the organizational structure binding OOPSLA and Onward! together needed to be refactored not just to allow these 2 tracks to co-exist on a equal basis but also to provide a framework for including new paper tracks, keeping the conference new and fresh. After several community discussions, it was finally decided to create a new umbrella conference -- SPLASH, the ACM Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity.
Since 2010, SPLASH has been the conceptual and administrative umbrella for OOPSLA, Onward!, a variety of other program events such as the Educators' Symposium, Experience Reports, Workshops, Panels, etc., and a variety of colocated events. OOPSLA is now 'just' the technical track of high-quality research papers that had been at the core of the OOPSLA Conference from the beginning. At the same time, OOPSLA has broadened the scope of topics of interest well beyond OO, and currently accepts a variety of programming-related papers. By creating SPLASH as the umbrella conference, the community can now sustain new paper tracks that don't fit in OOPSLA but that are closely related, therefore giving itself the space to innovate, just like it did with Onward!
SPLASH is proud of its OOPSLA heritage of creativity and openness.
The SPLASH website for the current year is always available at http://www.splashcon.org/.