accu organisation accu previously known as association of c and c users is a nonprofit user group of people interested in software development dedicated to raising the standard of computer programming the accu publishes two journals and organizes an annual conference history accu was formed in 1987 by martin houston the original name of the organisation was c users group uk and this remained the formal name of the organisation until 2011 although it adopted the public name association of c and c users for the period 1993 as the formal name suggests the organisation was originally created for people in the united kingdom however the membership is worldwide predominantly european and north american but also with members from central and southern america australasia africa and asia originally the voluntary association was mainly for c programmers but it has expanded over time to include all programming languages especially c c java perl and python publications the accu currently publishes two journals c vu is a membersonly journal which acts as the associations newsletter and carries book reviews articles on software development and a number of regular columns such as student code critique and professionalism in programming it was edited by phil stubbington from its first issue until 1991 overload aims to carry more indepth articles aimed at professional software developers topics range from programming and design through to process and management overload is available online to members and nonmembers free of charge other journals have been published by accu in the past accent was the news letter of the silicon valley chapter and caugers was the news letter of the acorn special interest group overload was originally the journal of accus c special interest group but is no longer languagespecific local groups the silicon valley chapter organized local meetings in san jose local groups were formed in london bristol bath oxford cambridge north east england southern england and zurich conference the accu is operated by a volunteer committee elected at an annual general meeting during the annual conference each spring which from 1997 to 2012 took place in oxford and for the first time in bristol in 2013 it attracts speakers from the computing community including david abrahams andrei alexandrescu ross j anderson james coplien tom gilb kevlin henney andrew koenig simon peytonjones eric s raymond guido van rossum greg stein bjarne stroustrup the designer and original implementor of c herb sutter and daveed vandevoorde the uk python conference for the python programming language originally started out as a track at the accu conference standardisation accu supports the standardisation process for computer programming languages accu provided financial sponsorship of meetings in the uk for both the international organization for standardization iso c programming language working group and the iso c working groups and helped finance travel to ecma meetings in mainland europe mailing lists the accu operates mailing lists some of which are also open to nonmembers these lists allow for general programmingorientated discussions but also for mentored discussions mentored groups have included effective c python software patterns functional programming and xml they are often based around study of a book accu official site the c acorn user group with back issues of caugers cug accu silicon valley chapter 