The title of this editorial is borrowed from Marcel Proust's autobiographical novel to describe a new category of papers, which we call "origins papers", and which will appear in TOPLAS from time to time.rnAn origins paper is a technical contribution that describes the genesis and development of an important idea in programming languages and systems. Athena may have sprung fully-formed from the brow of Zeus, but ideas in science often require several iterations and a lot of sweat and tears from many researchers before reaching a finished text-book form. An origins paper describes the historical milieu out of which an idea arose, credits the contributions of various people to the finished product, and may document the dead-ends that were explored by the research community before the big idea emerged from the mists.
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