[HN Gopher] The Early Development of Programming Languages (1976...
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The Early Development of Programming Languages (1976) [pdf]
 
Author : nynyny7
Score  : 46 points
Date   : 2021-01-10 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
 
web link (bitsavers.trailing-edge.com)
w3m dump (bitsavers.trailing-edge.com)
 
| Rochus wrote:
| This link seems to work better:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180224191459/http://bitsavers....
 
  | pmcjones wrote:
  | Actually, this is the original (non-mirrored) link and it works
  | fine: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/stanford/cs_techReports/STAN-
  | CS-76-...
  | 
  | bitsavers.org, maintained by Al Kossow, is a very important
  | resource for computer history.
 
    | Rochus wrote:
    | Yes, works also fine for me; maybe the link of the original
    | post should be corrected.
 
| Torwald wrote:
| I haven't read it fully yet, but I will write that TPK algorithm
| in some language(s). Post here if you have some (! OR ?)
 
  | shadowofneptune wrote:
  | This appears to be what it would be in C or C++.
  | float f(float t)        {               return sqrt(abs(t)) + 5
  | * pow(t, 3);       }                void tpk(void)        {
  | int i;               float y, a[11];               for (int i =
  | 0; i < 11; ++i)                       scanf("%f", &a[i]);
  | for (int i = 11; i > 0; --i) {                       y =
  | f(a[i]);                       if (y > 400)
  | printf("%d TOO LARGE", i);                       else
  | printf("%d %f", i, y);               }       }
 
  | svat wrote:
  | https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Trabb_Pardo%E2%80%93Knuth_algor...
 
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| One of the highlights of reading The Art of Computer Programming
| (TAOCP) is the small historical lessons sprinkled in the text.
| Truth be told they're usually the main thing I understand.
| Sometimes I wish Knuth would just write a history book on
| computing. He has such a unique perspective as both a leader of
| the field and a great historian of it. Of course at this point he
| probably shouldn't have any distractions from TAOCP.
 
| svat wrote:
| This is a paper by Donald Knuth and his student Luis Trabb Pardo,
| and the published version has a more readable reprint:
| https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0.50019-8 (without
| paywall: http://sci-
| hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0...). See also
| someone's blog post:
| https://gregorias.github.io/2014/11/22/early-high-level-prog...
| 
| There's also a video version of this paper:
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262213...
| -- This is a nice talk (~80 minutes followed by ~30 minutes of
| Q&A) that Donald Knuth gave on 2003-December-03 at the Computer
| History Museum. This paper was reprinted with corrections/updates
| as pages 1 to 93 of "Selected Papers on Computer Languages" (the
| fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers), and the talk was given
| shortly after this book came out, so he spoke about the first
| chapter of the book.
| 
| The clever idea here is to illustrate (very) early programming
| languages from their first decade (roughly 1947 to 1957), by
| writing the same program ("TPK") in each of them. A while ago I
| added a little bit about it to the lede of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TPK_algorithm&old...
| 
| What it reveals is that many ideas of programming languages that
| we now consider obvious in fact took a long time and many people
| to be developed. The early programming languages did not look at
| all like languages have looked, more or less, since 1958 (when
| both ALGOL and LISP were introduced).
| 
| > _This talk will discuss contributions of Zuse (1945), Goldstine
| and von Neumann (1946), Curry (1948), Mauchly et al (1949), Burks
| (1950), Wheeler (1951), Rutishauser (1951), Bohm (1951), Glennie
| (1952), Hopper et al (1953), Laning and Zierler (1953), Brooker
| (1954), Kaminynin and Ljubimskiy (1954), Ershov (1955), Grems and
| Porter (1955), Elsworth et al (1955), Blum (1956), Perlis et al
| (1956), Katz et al (1956), Bauer and Samelson (1956), Melahn et
| al (1956), as well as the prototype of FORTRAN developed by
| Backus et al from 1954 to 1957. At least a dozen of these efforts
| will be illustrated by showing how a particular procedure called
| the TPK algorithm might have been coded at the time._
 
| macintux wrote:
| For anyone who may need more incentive to download the PDF: Knuth
| is co-author.
 
  | codetrotter wrote:
  | Speaking of names, in the abstract of the paper they mention:
  | 
  | > Curry ("Composition", 1948)
  | 
  | And suddenly I was like wow I wonder if the concept of currying
  | was invented by this guy so I look it up. Turns out that while
  | someone else is credited for inventing currying, it's named
  | after this Curry guy indeed. And more things are named after
  | him, including the Haskell programming language.
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying
  | 
  | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Curry
 
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