In this workshop session, three speakers present their viewpoints and contributions to the topic of portable parallel programming languages. They are Dennis Gannon from Indiana University, David Loveman from Digital EquipmentCorporation, and David Padua from the Universityof Illinois. Their presentations discuss extensions to C++, Fortran, and compiler support for standard languages on parallel architectures, respectively. This paper introduces the topic performance portability on parallel machines. We will then try to draw a picture of where we are today in providing portable parallel languages to a growing user community, given that the three contributions represent major milestones along this path.