OOPSLA stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications. It is an annual research conference sponsored by the ACM, and for decades it served as the central gathering point for the object-oriented programming community. The first OOPSLA was held in 1986, and its proceedings were published by the ACM as the “Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications.”
The ACM Digital Library record for OOPSLA 1986 documents the conference taking place in Portland, Oregon, and shows the kind of work that defined the field at the time. The proceedings include David A. Moon’s paper on the redesigned Flavors object system at Symbolics, the Trellis/Owl language with its multiple-inheritance type hierarchy and compile-time type checking, and Henry Lieberman’s “Using Prototypical Objects to Implement Shared Behavior in Object-Oriented Systems,” an early statement of prototype-based programming. These papers show OOPSLA capturing object orientation just as it moved from research labs toward the mainstream.
OOPSLA became known as the venue where ideas now considered standard practice were first worked out in public. Research on patterns, on refactoring, and on language design for objects circulated through its papers, panels, and hallway conversations. The conference cultivated an unusually broad mix of academics, language designers, and working practitioners, which helped its ideas spread quickly into industry.
Over time OOPSLA was folded into a larger umbrella event called SPLASH (Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity), with the OOPSLA name preserved as the research track. That continuity reflects how the conference outlasted any single language fashion: the object-oriented vocabulary it helped popularize, including classes, inheritance, and message passing, became the default way much of the software industry organizes code.
For the broader story of the ideas presented there, see object orientation, design patterns, and the Gang of Four design patterns book whose authors were active in the OOPSLA community. As a community institution, OOPSLA sits alongside language-specific conferences such as PyCon in shaping how programmers learn from one another.