SPLASH/OOPSLA @ 40 Panel

Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of ACM’s SPLASH/OOPSLA Conference Series:

Escaped from the Lab: ACM’s SPLASH Influences on the Future of Software?

Impresario:

• Steven Fraser, Innoxec

Raconteur:

• Dennis Mancl, MSWX

Panelists:

• Jonathan Aldrich, CMU – General Chair SPLASH 2015
• Kent Beck, Thinkies – Program Chair OOPSLA 1989
• Crista Lopes, UCI – Program Chair OOPSLA 2013, General Chair OOPSLA 2011, and Onward! Chair OOPSLA 2007
• Bertrand Meyer, Eiffel Software – OOPSLA 1986 Contributor
• Mira Mezini, TU Darmstadt – Program Chair OOPSLA 2023
• Alex Potanin, ANU – General Chair SPLASH 2022 and Co-Chair OOPSLA 2024
• Doug Schmidt, William & Mary – Program Chair OOPSLA 2004
• Guy Steele, Tech Squares – Program Chair OOPSLA 2003, Onward! Essays Chair 2015

Escaped from the Lab: ACM’s SPLASH Influences on the Future of Software?

New technologies continue to transform the landscape of programming languages and software engineering. The past 40 years have seen advances in hardware with the evolution of global high speed/capacity networking, mobile devices, IoT, and data centers. Technology innovations have inspired the emergence of software platforms such as web APIs, cloud computing, microservices, and LLM-based AI. Where will we go next? Application programming is no longer limited to the educated, trained, and experienced professional. Users now craft their own spreadsheets, scripting tools, and AI prompt engineering interfaces to define new algorithms, workflows, and automation. In the future, how will SPLASH and similar conferences contribute to catalyzing collaborations, making connections, disseminating research results, and sharing best practices with our dynamic community.

Jonathan Aldrich

Position Statement

As a young Object Oriented Programming researcher, Jonathan Aldrich valued OOPSLA because it fostered the nascent object-oriented programming community before it became popular or accepted by the larger research world. Volunteering 5 times as a graduate student, Aldrich got to know that community and appreciate its history. The initial OOPSLA program in 1986 was one for the ages, bursting with ideas that had been waiting for a conference that was ready to accept them! Aldrich attended every OOPSLA/SPLASH since 1998 except one (missed you, San Diego!) and took on new roles including General Chair SPLASH’15, PC Chair SPLASH’17, and the inaugural SPLASH Hybridization Chair when SPLASH was the first major ACM conference to come back from Covid. SPLASH is broader now, but it’s still special for its openness to papers related to language design, language-related software engineering tools, social science-adjacent research such as programming language usability, and of course objects.

The SPLASH community has given us so many ideas that combine the idealism of programming languages with practical solutions to engineering in the world. Objects have, in the end, had tremendous impact, so much so that they are an assumed part of our software world rather than a thing you choose. Design patterns, refactoring, frameworks, reflection, the agile movement, actors, pluggable, optional, and gradual type system, ownership, and so many novel but practical approaches for reasoning about real systems. Aldrich is tremendously proud of what our community has done and excited about what the next 40 years will bring!

Bio

Jonathan Aldrich is a Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Master of Software Engineering program. He is the coauthor (with Michael Scott) of the textbook Programming Language Pragmatics, 5th edition. His research combines programming languages, software engineering, and human-computer interaction to explore how the way we express software affects our ability to engineer software at scale. A particular theme of much of his work is improving software quality and programmer productivity through better ways to express structural and behavioral aspects of software design within source code. Aldrich has contributed to ownership, typestate checking, modular and gradual verification techniques, and usability in programming language and type system design. For his work specifying and verifying architecture, he received a 2006 NSF CAREER award, the 2007 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, and an ICSE test of time award. From 2021-2025, he was the CTO of Noteful, a startup delivering an educational app for music theory and note reading. Jonathan served as general chair (2015), program chair (2017), steering committee chair (2017-2019), and hybridization chair (2021) of SPLASH and OOPSLA; he currently serves on ACM Council.

Kent Beck

Position Statement

Like the great trading centers of the ancient world, OOPSLA became the cross-roads where people with overlapping interests came together – academics and practitioners, various schools of programming language design, various scales of teams and forms of risk. OOPSLA/SPLASH has been a supportive place to bring half-baked ideas in hopes of further baking.



Bio

Beck launched his public programming career with a disastrous demonstration of Smalltalk at the first OOPSLA in Portland (1986). Notable achievements include patterns (with Ward Cunningham), JUnit (with Erich Gamma), TDD, and Extreme Programming. Beck is the author of many books on software development and Extreme Programming, including the classic 1999 book “Extreme Programming Explained.” He currently programs daily with the genie and publishes at TidyFirst.substack.com.

Crista Lopes

Position Statement

The Post-Syntax Era and the Rise of Software “Curation and Verification”: For decades, SPLASH and OOPSLA served as high priests of a “Professional Guild” of software. We defined formalisms, types, and abstractions that have made software manageable for the highly trained few. But the “Lab” has not just been escaped; it has been wrapped into oblivion. When an LLM can generate a Continuation-Passing Style interpreter or a complex web API from a few lines of natural language, the traditional barriers of unintuitive code syntax and skilled code crafting have effectively dissolved.

However, programming is more than the act of writing code; it is the act of precise thinking.

As software creation becomes a ubiquitous end-user activity, the role of conferences like SPLASH must evolve. We are moving from yesterday’s world of Software Construction to tomorrow’s world of Software Curation and Verification. My position for this panel is centered on three shifts:

• From Syntax to Semantics: If anyone can generate code, the value of the “professional” shifts from knowing how to write to knowing what is right. SPLASH must become the vanguard of practices and tools for automated verification and explanation. Our research shouldn’t just be about better languages, but about languages that can “audit” the probabilistic outputs of AI and keep them real.
• The New “Exercises in Style”: Software quality is no longer just about the elegance of expression, but the robustness of intent. We need to define new “Programming Styles” for the AI era - how do we structure conversations with machines to ensure the resulting sociotechnical systems are resilient and secure?
• The Conference as a collaborative sandbox: In a world where research “escapes” to GitHub in hours rather than years, SPLASH’s role is to be the Intellectual Anchor. We shouldn’t just disseminate results; we should be the space where a dynamic community of practitioners and a formal community of theorists come together to define the constraints of this chaotic new reality.

The future of software is messy. Our job is to ensure that this mess will not lead to a Software Dark Age of unmaintainable, hallucinated systems, but rather to a new era of empowered, high-integrity creation.

Bio

Cristina (Crista) Lopes is a Professor of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine. Her research focuses on software engineering and programming languages for large-scale data and systems. Early in her career, she was a founding member of the team at Xerox PARC that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming. Along with her research program, she is also a prolific software developer. Her open source contributions include being one of the core developers of OpenSimulator, a virtual world server. She is also a founder and consultant of Encitra, a company specializing in online virtual reality for early-stage sustainable urban redevelopment projects. Her book “Exercises in Programming Style” has gained rave reviews. ACM Computing Surveys chose this volume in their list of “Notable Books” in 2014.
She has a Ph.D. from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal. She is the recipient of several awards, including a prestigious CAREER Award and a Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest.

Bertrand Meyer

Position Statement

Bertrand Meyer has been involved with OOPSLA from its inception. He authored a widely cited paper at the first conference, introducing the concept of genericity into object-oriented programming. His involvement with object technology dates back to Simula 67, and he has since played a leading role in shaping the field through his work on the Eiffel programming language, Design by Contract, and software engineering methodology. Bertrand will argue that although object technology has been enormously successful, some of its original ideas have gradually been diluted or lost. He will revisit key concepts — including abstract data types, multiple inheritance, genericity, and contracts—and discuss why they remain highly relevant in an era increasingly influenced by AI-assisted software development.

Bio

Bertrand Meyer is the author of numerous influential books on object-oriented programming and software engineering, including the classic Object-Oriented Software Construction. He was the first recipient of the Dahl-Nygaard Prize for contributions to object technology and has received the ACM Software System Award for the design of Eiffel, the IEEE Harlan Mills Award, and the Jolt Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IFIP, a member of several academies, and the recipient of two honorary doctorates.

His recent work spans requirements engineering (Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis, Springer, 2023), formal software verification, AI-assisted software development, and artificial intelligence education. His latest book, AI for Smarties: Understanding Artificial Intelligence (2026), explains the principles behind modern AI for engineers, students, and technically curious readers, emphasizing understanding over hype.

Mira Mezini

Position Statement

At her first OOPSLA conference in 1994, Menzi was overwhelmed by the vitality of the community. Menzi had been working on making the meta-level architecture of Smalltalk, to make that architecture more expressive. She found thousands of OOPSLA participants filling the halls; the industry exhibition floor brought together researchers and industry practitioners in genuine, productive dialogue. Industry was not merely consuming research, it was shaping it. We need to recapture that symbiosis.

In the early days, OOPSLA was focused on Smalltalk and C++, but it also set in motion a cascade of innovation. Live programming environments, Model-View-Controller, reflective architecture led to environments like Self that incorporated virtual machines. Today we see that power in JavaScript engines and the JVM. We also developed metaobject protocols, open implementations, and meta-level architectures. Recently, Menzi found herself recommending Kiczales’s OOPSLA 1994 keynote to her students as they worked on the vision of application-driven systems.

The cascade of innovations continued well beyond object-orientation. OOPSLA became the venue that advanced many approaches to software production: design patterns, refactoring, aspect-oriented programming, test-driven development, agile methodologies, wikis, and model-driven engineering. New language ideas were refined at OOPSLA: type systems, module systems, and compiler techniques for dynamic languages. Ownership types were introduced in a 1998 paper by Clarke, Potter, and Noble (“Ownership Types for Flexible Alias Protection”) to enforce that objects do not alias across encapsulation boundaries. Decades later, Rust’s ownership and borrow checker system draws on this intellectual lineage. Few stories better illustrate OOPSLA’s mode of impact: a formal type-theoretic paper from 1998 that was born in our community quietly became the foundation of one of the most celebrated programming languages of the 2020s.

All of these ideas escaped the lab — the apt title of this panel — and colonized the software industry in ways their authors could not always foresee.

One could connect “vibe coding” to a 2003 Onward! paper “Beyond AOP: Toward Naturalistic Programming” by Cristina Lopes, Paul Dourish, and colleagues and follow-up work in my lab on “Towards Naturalistic Programming.” We asked ourselves: what if programs could be written in terms closer to natural human thought? Today’s “coding through AI agents using natural language prompts” is making a kind of naturalistic programming real — but in an ad hoc, uncontrolled, and semantically impoverished way. The execution of the vision our community articulated a while ago is happening in the wild without us. And that is a problem.

The most transformative shift now reshaping how software is written — the rise of foundational code models — has been designed almost entirely by machine learning researchers, not by programming language designers, type theorists, or compiler engineers. In 2023, Dimitrios Vytiniotis’s keynote talk at OOPSLA explored the intersection where PL research and ML systems meet. His talk “Scaling Up Machine Learning Without Tears: And What Do Programming Languages Have to Do with It?” started an important conversation. But one keynote is not enough. The broader PL and software engineering community has largely remained a bystander while stochastic systems generate billions of lines of code that cannot be formally verified, whose correctness no one can guarantee, and whose trust is questionable at best.

The naturalistic programming vision that Onward! dared to articulate twenty years ago needs to be rescued from ad hoc reality and given the rigor it deserves: grounded semantics, compositional correctness, and the kind of principled language design that has always been OOPSLA’s hallmark. Future SPLASH conferences could be defined by this challenge. We need to be bold enough to take it on.

Bio

Mezini is a Professor of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt (TUDa), leading the Software Technology Lab. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Siegen in Germany, she was a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University (USA) before joining TUDa in 2000. She serves on the board of the German National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE and co-directs hessian.AI, the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence. She is also co-spokesperson of the Excellence Cluster “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence”. Mezini has also held visiting professorships at Lancaster University (UK) and Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland).

Mezini’s current research focuses on two areas: programming language systems - with current focus on reliable distributed and AI software — and foundational code models. Her awards include two IBM Eclipse Innovation Awards (2005 and 2006), a Google Research Award (2017), and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2012. A member of the German Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Academia Europaea, Mezini was recently named an ACM Fellow and elected to the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Mezini was awarded the Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize 2025 — one of the most prestigious in the field of programming and software engineering.

Alex Potanin

Position Statement

Potanin’s first conference was OOPSLA 2002 in Seattle. He attended as an undergraduate student to take part in the ACM Student Research Competition. Bill Gates was a plenary keynote, there were over 2,200 attendees, and industry folks attended revenue-generating tutorials delivered by the original Gang of Four, Ruby creators, and XP gurus such as Kent Beck. Potanin was awed and impressed by the event and as a result, decided to begin an academic career in Programming Languages. He focused on OOPSLA and related conferences.

Potanin published his first conference paper at OOPSLA 2006. After three successive papers, he was invited to the OOPSLA 2014 PC with a compulsory (at that time) in-person meeting. His last in-person PC meeting was for OOPSLA 2019 just prior to the pandemic. He took on leadership roles such as publications chair, workshops chair, and hybridization chair during COVID. Potanin brought SPLASH to New Zealand in 2022 and held it at a free campus venue - a drastic change from the large convention centers of 2002 and 2003 during his days as a doctoral student.

SPLASH started in 2010 as a scaled-down and retargeted version of OOPSLA. When the first SPLASH was held in 2010 at a Reno casino-hotel, the hoteliers mistakenly expected ACM conference attendees to gamble vociferously. They were disappointed because attendees preferred chatting and connecting. However, a smaller SPLASH was profitable given the conference’s reduced expenses.

The size of the OOPSLA papers track has grown. There were 300 submissions for OOPSLA 2019, which grew to 400 for OOPSLA 2024 - and submissions now exceed 600. This is an amazing increase from the typical 120 OOPSLA submissions throughout the 1990s. Since then, the Program Committee has grown and diversified as the conference community evolved. SPLASH/OOPSLA has become one of the most open SIGPLAN conferences to those who do not consider themselves hardcore Programming Language aficionados.

Some questions: How do conferences deal with the large number of papers especially given how powerful AI makes us feel? Do we require every paper to use LLMs to the max to provide completed mechanized proofs, case studies, etc.? Do we ban LLMs from any review work? Do we only accept papers from those already in the community and become a clique? Do we open up to those who cannot afford to travel? Do we save money on every aspect of organization to avoid social media storms regarding budgets and costs? Do we fade into irrelevance due to AI? Do we go to the forefront due to the current fad of Verification and AI? How do we learn from our 40-year history and stay relevant to the software community?

Programming language, verification, systems, and software engineering graduates are absolutely essential to a world that is becoming heavily reliant on AI. Without our SPLASH/OOPSLA community, the current advances in software wouldn’t have been possible - they wouldn’t have scaled and they wouldn’t have executed securely or otherwise. Our community needs to position itself as the essential instrument for software progress and to ensure we do not get distracted by shiny new things - while giving space for novel ideas to be presented in a safe and welcoming place. [Alex typed the initial draft of this position statement “live” into an email to Steven Fraser without the use of AI, a LLM, or a spellchecker.]

Bio

Potanin completed his doctoral studies on Generic Ownership, showing how type polymorphism can be used to provide ownership type support in any language. This approach has since been widely adopted by the Rust Programming Language as “lifetime parameters.” Potanin went on to demonstrate deep connections between ownership and immutability with the support of the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund (2008 - 2011). After a sabbatical at CMU working with Jonathan Aldrich, Potanin created the Wyvern Programming Language - a novel general-purpose language designed from the ground up with security and usability as its primary goals. This produced numerous publications including work on type-specific languages and decidable typing for type members.

Since joining the Australian National University in 2022, Potanin’s research has centered on trustworthy systems and quantum program verification including the Fiducia language for verified embedded systems (building on the seL4 microkernel) and the first embedding of quantum program verification into Dafny (OOPSLA 2025). His follow-on work on quantum state preparation was recognized by an ESOP 2026 Distinguished Paper Award. He is a Permanent Member of IFIP Working Group 2.4, a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Trustworthy Systems group at UNSW Sydney, and leads the School of Computing’s GenAI teaching deployment under the ANU–Anthropic partnership. Potanin is the Chair of the Splash Steering Committee and was the General Chair for SPLASH 2022. He has also held leadership roles with OOSPLA 2024 and APLAS 2025 and numerous other program committees spanning two decades.

Douglas C. Schmidt

Position Statement

Over the past four decades, OOPSLA – and later SPLASH – has played a key role in shaping how the software community thinks about abstraction, composition, and evolution. At its best, OOPSLA was never merely a venue for programming language features or tools; it was a forum where ideas about software as a human activity were debated seriously. Concepts such as modularity, reuse, frameworks, software patterns, and middleware were not treated as academic curiosities, but as responses to real scalability pressures in software-reliant systems. This pragmatic–theoretical balance distinguished OOPSLA from both purely academic programming language venues and purely industrial conferences.

A defining contribution of OOPSLA was its insistence that software architecture and developer cognition matter as much as formal correctness. The goal of human understanding of software has led to work on patterns, reflective systems, component frameworks, and object-oriented middleware. This valuable research bridged programming languages, systems, and software engineering. OOPSLA’s intellectual “middle ground” enabled ideas to move quickly from papers to operational platforms, influencing mainstream practice in enterprise systems, distributed computing, and later cloud-native architectures. In many ways, OOPSLA normalized the idea that good software research must engage with scale, deployment, and evolution, rather than elegance or formalism alone.

From a long-term perspective, the enduring influence of OOPSLA/SPLASH lies less in any specific language or paradigm and more in advancing three norms of software production. First, software abstractions must earn their keep in real systems. Next, developer productivity and system evolution are first-class research concerns. Finally, dialogue between academia and practice is not optional. Although generative AI and intent-driven development are reshaping how today’s software is built, the original OOPSLA ethos – questioning how abstractions amplify or constrain human intent at scale – feels newly relevant. The challenge for SPLASH going forward is to reclaim that integrative role. SPLASH must once again serve as the place where the software community asks its hardest, most consequential questions. We should not chase trends.

Bio

Schmidt is the inaugural Dean of the School of Computing, Data Sciences, and Physics at William & Mary and a longtime leader at the intersection of software research, practice, and policy. He previously held senior academic and research leadership roles at Vanderbilt University and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Over four decades, his research has shaped object-oriented frameworks, software patterns, middleware, and model-driven engineering for large-scale, mission-critical systems, with recent work focusing on prompt engineering patterns and generative augmented intelligence. He holds degrees from William & Mary and the University of California, Irvine and has been an active contributor to the OOPSLA/SPLASH community throughout his career.

Guy Steele

Position Statement

The first major conference sponsored by SIGPLAN that turned into an annual series was POPL, starting in 1973, and it has remained much the same for more than half a century now, focusing on the principles of programming language design. The second major SIGPLAN conference series started in 1979 as a specialty symposium on Compiler Construction, held every two to three years, but in 1988 it became PLDI, centered more broadly on all the practical aspects of programming language design and implementation. So if you were writing programming-language papers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and wanted to publish in a SIGPLAN conference, the decision process was pretty simple: if your paper was theoretical and of broad interest, try POPL; if it was practical and of broad interest, try PLDI; otherwise look for a specialized workshop or conference, such as LFP (Lisp and Functional Programming), ASPLOS, or PPoPP.

One of those newly created specialized conferences was OOPSLA (1986). Object-oriented programming, epitomized at that time by Smalltalk, was beginning to attract broader attention, and there were many experiments in adopting object-oriented programming ideas into existing or new programming languages. The definition of C++ had just been published the year before. New object-oriented languages and ideas published at the first OOPSLA conference touched on over a dozen different programming languages and environments.

There was clearly so much cooking in this new arena of object-oriented programming that OOPSLA, unlike PLDI and ICFP (which grew out of the biennial Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming), immediately became an annual conference.

And then a funny thing happened: in the 1990s and into the 2000s, the center of gravity of programming language design shifted away from “conventional” procedural languages (e.g., Fortran, Algol, Pascal, C, and Ada), towards object-oriented programming languages such as C++, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Python, and all their successors. Today, object-oriented programming is not a specialty topic; it is entirely mainstream, and this has been reflected by the use of “SPLASH” as the umbrella conference title since 2010. One could argue that SPLASH has become SIGPLAN’s broadest conference, encompassing more topics than POPL, ICFP, or PLDI. All these conferences are important, but SPLASH now has a much more central role than I might have anticipated at the turn of the millennium.

Four topics that may be getting ever-increasing programming-language attention in the near future are (1) quantum computing, (2) homomorphic encryption, (3) programmable massively-multiplayer online games, and (4) language models and related AI applications. The last of these may change the very nature of the programming process itself in ways that have already begun to unfold and are hard to predict. Nevertheless, I suggest that SPLASH is likely to continue to be an appropriate venue for publication in all of these areas as they develop – yes, POPL, PLDI, ICFP, and ASPLOS will also have roles to play as the theory and technologies mature, but I suspect SPLASH will continue to be a melting pot that encourages adventurous preliminary exploration as well as reporting on successful deployment.

Bio

Steele retired in January 2025 after a career of more than 50 years in the design, documentation, implementation, maintenance, and standardization of computer programming languages. He joined ACM in 1971; the same year he implemented a Lisp interpreter for the IBM 1130.

He taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, then worked for Tartan Laboratories, Thinking Machines Corporation, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, and Oracle Labs. He has been given the Grace Murray Hopper Award (1988), the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (1996), and the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (2007). He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States of America.

He has served on the accredited standards committees X3J11 (C language) and X3J3 (Fortran), and additionally served as chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp). He served as the first project editor for the ECMAScript standard for JavaScript. He and Gerald Jay Sussman created the Scheme programming language, and he was a member of the IEEE committee that produced IEEE Standard 1178-1990 for Scheme. In 2021, he served as co-chair of the Fourth ACM SIGPLAN Conference on the History of Programming Languages.

Steven D. Fraser

Position Statement

Since its inception, OOPSLA evolved from a conference with a focused object-oriented agenda to today’s more expansive and inclusive SPLASH conference where the OOPSLA research program is a core component. The original OOPSLA of the 1980s and 1990s was the best forum for learning about software programming languages and environments through research presentations, workshops, panels, tutorials, and tool vendor trade shows. Academic researchers and industry practitioners came together to promote and share their ideas. Learning and networking were key motivations for building a community of attendees.

Today the landscape of technical conferences has fractured. A multitude of specialized conferences exist, attracting smaller subsets of academic researchers and industry practitioners. Potential academic and industry conference attendees face rising costs, international travel restrictions, cutbacks in funding for travel, and staff reductions.

In the early 2000s, the organizers of OOPSLA decided to look beyond object-orientation and their core of year-over-year participants. Over time, SPLASH emerged as a new umbrella conference organization with a broader focus on the impact of software technology on “humanity.” During the pandemic, experiments with virtualization improved conference reach, but not necessarily the conference experience. Much of the conference experience (and impact) depends on personal interaction and serendipity – something that virtual platforms have yet to facilitate effectively.

New software continues to transform “the world of work.” Forty years ago, OOPSLA attendees aspired to make the field of software development more open, cooperative, and egalitarian. SPLASH still shares those aspirations, but today’s technologies can be distracting and disrupt learning. Attendees of the first OOPSLA could be more focused; they had no smart phones, mass-produced laptops, or social media networks to divert their attention. With emergent “generative” technologies, will human science and engineering discipline change for the better or the worse? Only time will tell.

Bio

Steven Fraser (Innoxec) advises on partnerships to accelerate innovation through collaboration, networking, and open software ecosystems. As a conference panel impresario since 1994 he has organized and moderated over 75 panels and workshops for the SPLASH/OOPSLA, ICSE, and XP Conference Series. He has participated in 30 SPLASH/OOPSLA conferences since attending his first in 1989 (New Orleans).

Prior to Innoxec, Fraser led HP’s Global University Programs and served as the Director of the Cisco Research Center. He has orchestrated university research partnerships, led Ph.D. recruiting, lectured on open innovation and agile software best practices, and organized international corporate design forums. At Qualcomm’s Learning Center, in the role of Senior Staff, Fraser directed technical learning programs to upskill engineers in software best practices and emergent wireless technologies while leveraging university partnerships. As a Senior Manager (Global External Research) at Nortel (Northern Telecom) and Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) he developed and deployed open innovation, software reuse, and team-based collaborative development strategies.

Fraser received his Ph.D. in Electrical (Software) Engineering from McGill University (Montréal), his Masters from Queen’s University at Kingston in Engineering Physics, and his Bachelors in Physics and Computer Science from McGill University. He is a Senior Member of both the ACM and the IEEE.

Dennis Mancl

Position Statement

In its forty years, OOPSLA and SPLASH started from an early showcase for a useful but underdeveloped software design approach, then developed into an important forum for exploring new software engineering ideas, and finally became a place to critique and reflect on how we learn and teach new software technologies. Software isn’t dead yet – we refuse to be replaced by robots and smart aleck machine learning technology. We have learned that both research and commerce will be better served by relying on the knowledge, experience, and judgment of living people – the best path for software to continue to serve humanity.

Bio

Dennis Mancl is a retired software developer and coach, with decades of Bell Labs experience in the area of software practices in telecom. Mancl is especially interested in “soft” issues in software engineering: teamwork, collaboration, design brainstorming, refactoring, diverse teams, critical thinking skills, and continuing education. Most of his current work is about how to be a good lifelong learner. He is still an occasional presenter at international ACM and Agile conferences, where he helps organize and report on conference panel discussions. Mancl has been a volunteer with the Princeton Chapter since 1983. Mancl shares some of his recent presentations, notes from conference panel sessions, and other research at https://manclswx.com.