SPLASH

Welcome to Tucson, Arizona and the 2012 Systems, Programming, Languages, Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) conference! This is the third annual SPLASH conference. SPLASH is an umbrella conference containing OOPSLA, Onward!, and Wavefront. This year we also have the Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) and Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) co-located with us. The SPLASH conference grew out of OOPSLA, which started in 1986 and eventually grew to a SPLASH-like set of conferences (including Onward!) in 2009. Thus 2012 can be considered the 27th year of this great tradition.

The rebranding of the conference as SPLASH recognizes the growth of this area beyond object-oriented programming. However, the conference as a whole retains a similar set of interests. These interests span many areas of programming, programming languages, and software engineering. I invite you to dive into the research papers at OOPSLA, find out about cutting-edge industrial ideas at Wavefront, and expand your horizons at Onward! This year we have continued making 5 day registrations available, so that you can easily sample all these conferences as well as a variety of workshops and the DLS.

This year we are fortunate to have four keynote speakers who span different parts of the SPLASH tradition. Barbara Simons's keynote addresses the timely application area of electronic voting. Jim Coplien's keynote about the Data, Context, and Interaction paradigm will add to the SPLASH tradition of software design as well as offering a new perspective on how to design software for humanity. Rustan Leino's keynote promises to be at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering. Rob Pike's keynote on the Go language will address both programming language design and cutting-edge applications at Google.