The Advanced Programming Group (APSG) is a Specialist Group (SG) of the British Computer Society (BCS). It held its first meeting, when it was referred to as "BCS Study Group No. 5", at Bishop's House, High Holborn, London WC1, England on 17 December 1959. It has met continuously in London since then, generally on the second Thursday of the months from October to May each year.
Its purpose is to disseminate information on emerging concepts, programming languages, tools and techniques. Rather than relying on publication, the main format for communication is a talk from an invited speaker whose slides are made available on the Group's website.
Past chairmen of the Group were Ewart Willey (first chairman 1959–1974), Peter King (1974–1980), Peter Prowse (1980–1982) and John Florentin (1982–2010). The current chairman is Prof. Geoff Sharman (2011-).
From time to time, the Group holds joint meetings with other BCS SGs, for example:
- May 2010, with Fortran SG, Parallel Programming in Fortran with Coarrays
- January 2010 with Computer Conservation Society, The 50th Anniversary of the publication of the Algol 60 Report
- October 2006, with Computer Conservation Society, The first 35+ years of IBM Hursley software
- November 2005, with Formal Aspects SG (BCS-FACS), Separation Logic
The Group has had several recent talks focusing on each of the following topic areas:
- Aspect-oriented programming and Aspect-oriented Design (AOSD)
- Enterprise-Level Software Architecture (Enterprise software)
and most recently:
- Parallel programming for multi-core systems
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