Our Aims and Objectives

Information Technology and programming practices are now changing more rapidly than at any time in the past few decades. The first and second Internet revolutions have been succeeded by revolutions in mobile devices, data centre virtualisation and the rapid rise of 'Cloud Computing'. These have created huge opportunities requiring new styles of application and the re-engineering of existing applications, together with intense demands on programming staff to provide greater scale, greater reliability, more effective user interfaces, and agile responses to new requirements.

We seek to explore new developments in programming languages, runtime environments, programming tools, multicore processors, mobile platforms and end user interfaces which are important to today's real world applications.

Our Heritage

The Advanced Programming Specialist Group was founded in 1959 by a group of 18 members, chaired by Ewart L Willey of the Prudential Assurance Company, and originally known as "Group 5" since it was the fifth specialist group of BCS. It has held regular monthly meetings since then featuring leading guest speakers and topical debates. By tradition, it also holds an annual dinner at which the BCS President is the guest speaker.

APSG's members and guests have included many of the best known names in computing and the topics debated have included the development of programming languages, data and database management, processor and networking technology, distributed systems, object oriented programming, parallel programming, end user languages, aspect oriented programming, dynamic languages, software development tools and many others.

View a complete list of meetings held over the first 50 years (PDF)