Ask HN: Favorite Articles in the ACM Digital Library
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 Related: ACM Is Now Open Access https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454763 Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access It is a little hard to give you answers as the articles are open access but the search function on the ACM website is paywalled! Oh I didn't realize that. DuckDuckGo has a parameter to limit queries, it may work for other search engines.
Example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Adl.acm.org+evolution+of+lis... site:dl.acm.org