Now that all publications in the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library have become open access [^1], I thought it'd be fun and educational to make a "Best of ACM" list of favorite articles. Not only favorite, but historically relevant papers to the field of computer science.

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To start with, the series of papers presented at HOPL (History of Programming Languages) Conferences are great reading.

HOPL I (1978) https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025

> FORTRAN, ALGOL, COBOL, APT, JOVIAL, SIMULA, JOSS, BASIC, PL/I, SNOBOL, APL

HOPL II (1993) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766

> Pascal, Prolog, Icon, Smalltalk, ALGOL 68, Forth, C, Lisp, C++, Ada

HOPL III (2007) https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844

> AppleScript, Lua, Oberon, C++, Statecharts, Erlang, Fortran, ZPL, Slef, BETA, Emerald, Haskell

HOPL IV (2021) https://dl.acm.org/do/10.1145/event-12215/abs/

> Clojure, MATLAB, Groovy, Oz, APL, Emacs Lisp, Logo, Fortran, JavaScript, LabVIEW, D, F#, Smalltalk, Objective-C, C++, Verilog

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Edit: Someone pointed out that it's better to use the doi.org URL over dl.acm.org for individual papers.

[^1] https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2026/january/acm-open-access - Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454763 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313991

  site:dl.acm.org