Lambda the Ultimate - History

Computer History Museum releases PostScript source

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:15:19 +0000

The Computer History Museum, in conjunction with Adobe, has released the PostScript source code. Here is the release, with some helpful historical context and several photos:

The story of PostScript has many different facets. It is a story about profound changes in human literacy as well as a story of trade secrets within source code. It is a story about the importance of teams, and of geometry. And it is a story of the motivations and educations of engineer-entrepreneurs.

The Computer History Museum is excited to publicly release, for the first time, the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript. We thank Adobe, Inc. for their permission and support, and John Warnock for championing this release.

Built to Last

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 07:10:51 +0000

Mar Hicks. Built to Last. Logic. Issue 11, "Care".

It was this austerity-driven lack of investment in people—rather than the handy fiction, peddled by state governments, that programmers with obsolete skills retired—that removed COBOL programmers years before this recent crisis. The reality is that there are plenty of new COBOL programmers out there who could do the job. In fact, the majority of people in the COBOL programmers’ Facebook group are twenty-five to thirty-five-years-old, and the number of people being trained to program and maintain COBOL systems globally is only growing. Many people who work with COBOL graduated in the 1990s or 2000s and have spent most of their twenty-first century careers maintaining and programming COBOL systems...

In this sense, COBOL and its scapegoating show us an important aspect of high tech that few in Silicon Valley, or in government, seem to understand. Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term profit at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take.

Recently, work on the history of technology has been becoming increasingly more sophisticated and moved beyond telling the story of impressive technology to trying to unravel the social, political, and economic forces that affected the development, deployment, and use of a wide range of technologies and technological systems. Luckily, this trend is beginning to manifest itself in studies of the history of programming languages. While not replacing the need for careful, deeply informed, studies of the internal intellectual forces affecting the development of programming languages, these studies add a sorely needed aspect to the stories we tell.

History of Lisp

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 17:43:23 +0000

History of Lisp (The history of LISP according to McCarthy's memory in 1978, presented at the ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference.)

This is such a fun paper which I couldn't find on LtU. It's about the very early history of programming (1950s and '60s), back when things we take for granted today didn't exist yet.

On taking apart complex data structures with functions like CAR and CDR:

It was immediately apparent that arbitrary subexpressions of symbolic expressions could be obtained by composing the functions that extract immediate subexpressions, and this seemed reason enough to go to an algebraic language.

On creating new data, i.e. CONS:

At some point a cons(a,d,p,t) was defined, but it was regarded as a subroutine and not as a function with a value. ... Gelernter and Gerberich noticed that cons should be a function, not just a subroutine, and that its value should be the location of the word that had been taken from the free storage list. This permitted new expressions to be constructed out of subsubexpressions by composing occurrences of cons

On inventing IF:

This led to the invention of the true conditional expression which evaluates only one of N1 and N2 according to whether M is true or false and to a desire for a programming language that would allow its use.

On how supreme laziness led to the invention of garbage collection:

Once we decided on garbage collection, its actual implementation could be postponed, because only toy examples were being done.

You might have heard this before:

S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.

And the rest is history...

"C Is Not a Low-level Language"

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 03:09:16 +0000

David Chisnall, "C Is Not a Low-level Language. Your computer is not a fast PDP-11.", ACM Queue, Volume 16, issue 2.

"For a language to be "close to the metal," it must provide an abstract machine that maps easily to the abstractions exposed by the target platform. It's easy to argue that C was a low-level language for the PDP-11.
...
it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending thousands of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler—and even then, only if you violate some of the language rules. Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is "close to the metal" but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language."

Includes a discussion of various ways in which modern processors break the C abstract machine, as well as some interesting speculation on what a "non-C processor" might look like. The latter leads to thinking about what a low-level language for such a processor should look like.

People of Programming Languages Interviews

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 15:17:03 +0000

There is a growing set of fascinating interviews with PL folks at People of Programming Languages.

The APL Idiom List

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 01:23:59 +0000

Via HN: The APL Idiom List – Alan Perlis, Spencer Rubager (1977)

Co-hygiene and quantum gravity

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 15:11:24 +0000

Co-hygiene and quantum gravity. Some light weekend reading by John Shutt.

The post starts with a dazzling proposition:

Gravity corresponds to pure function-application, and the other fundamental forces correspond to side-effects. ... quantum non-locality ("spooky action at a distance") is part of the analog to side-effects ...

I can't do it justice here, so if you're interested in John's fascinating take on the relationship between lambda calculus and quantum physics, hop on over!

Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 02:45:32 +0000

Obituary from NY Times.

Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89
Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89.

....

Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer at Sperry Rand in the late 1950s, led the effort to bring computer makers together to collaborate on the new programming language. Ms. Hopper is often called the “mother of COBOL,” but she was not one of the six people, including Ms. Sammet, who designed the language — a fact Ms. Sammet rarely failed to point out. (Ms. Sammet worked for Sylvania Electric at the time.)

“I yield to no one in my admiration for Grace,” she said. “But she was not the mother, creator or developer of COBOL.”

Joe Armstrong Interviews Alan Kay

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 15:25:27 +0000

Youtube video (via HN)

By far not the best presentation of Kay's ideas but surely a must watch for fans. Otherwise, skip until the last third of the interview which might add to what most people here already know.

It is interesting that in this talk Kay rather explicitly talks about programming languages as abstraction layers. He also mentions some specifics that may not be as well known as others, yet played a role in his trajectory, such as META.

I fully sympathize with his irritation with the lack of attention to and appreciation of fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks in CS. On the other hand, I find his allusions to biology unconvincing.
An oh, he is certainly right about Minsky's book (my first introduction to theoretical CS) and in his deep appreciation of John McCarthy.

C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: How False Stereotypes Turn Into Technical “Truths”

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 03:50:09 +0000

Jean Yang & Ari Rabkin C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: How False Stereotypes Turn Into Technical “Truths”, Model-View-Culture, January 2015.

This is a bit of a change of pace from the usual technically-focused content on LtU, but it seemed like something that might be of interest to LtUers nonetheless. Yang and Rabkin discuss the cultural baggage that comes along with a variety of languages, and the impact it has on how those languages are perceived and used.

"These preconceived biases arise because programming languages are as much social constructs as they are technical ones. A programming language, like a spoken language, is defined not just by syntax and semantics, but also by the people who use it and what they have written. Research shows that the community and libraries, rather than the technical features, are most important in determining the languages people choose. Scientists, for instance, use Python for the good libraries for scientific computing."

There are probably some interesting clues to how and why some languages are adopted while others fall into obscurity (a question that has come up here before). Also, the article includes references to a study conducted by Rabkin and LtU's own Leo Meyerovich.

BWK on "How to succeed in language design without really trying"

Fri, 20 Nov 2015 15:50:33 +0000

A talk by Brian Kernighan at The University of Nottingham.

Describes all the usual suspects: AWK, EQN, PIC. Even AMPL. I was wondering which languages he had in mind when he mentioned that some of his creations were total flops. I'd love to learn from those!

The talk is a fun way to spend an hour, and the audio would be good for commuters. For real aficionados I would recommend reading Jon Bentley's articles on the design of these languages (as well as CHEM and others) instead.

Ancient use of generators

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 05:58:53 +0000

Guido van Rossum reminisces a bit about early discussions of generators in the Python community (read the other messages in the thread as well). I think we talked about the articles he mentions way back when. Earlier still, and beyond the discussion by Guido here, was Icon, a clever little language that I have a soft spot for. i don't think we ever fully assessed its influence on Python and other languages.

ACM Classic Books Series

Sun, 16 Aug 2015 06:24:53 +0000

This list of classic books is the result of a poll ACM conducted where members named their favorite computer science books.

Good list. Bar the last two, which I have nothing against, the list consists of favorites of mine. It is always nice to see how many classics of CS come from work on programming languages. Not a surprise for anyone here, of course, but not always acknowledged. While we are on the subject of classic books, check out Luke's twitter poll here.

Tracking the Flow of Ideas through the Programming Languages Literature

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 19:49:32 +0000

Michael Greenberg, Kathleen Fisher, and David Walker, "Tracking the Flow of Ideas through the Programming Languages Literature", SNAPL 2015.

How have conferences like ICFP, OOPSLA, PLDI, and POPL evolved over the last 20 years? Did generalizing the Call for Papers for OOPSLA in 2007 or changing the name of the umbrella conference to SPLASH in 2010 have any effect on the kinds of papers published there? How do POPL and PLDI papers compare, topic-wise? Is there related work that I am missing? Have the ideas in O’Hearn’s classic paper on separation logic shifted the kinds of papers that appear in POPL? Does a proposed program committee cover the range of submissions expected for the conference? If we had better tools for analyzing the programming language literature, we might be able to answer these questions and others like them in a data-driven way. In this paper, we explore how topic modeling, a branch of machine learning, might help the programming language community better understand our literature.

The authors have produced some really interesting visualizations of how the topic content of various conferences has evolved over time (it's interesting to note that OOPSLA isn't really about OO software development any more, and that PLDI appears to have seen an increasing emphasis on verification and test generation).

Also of potential interest to LtU readers: there is a prototype tool at http://tmpl.weaselhat.com/ that is based on the work presented in this paper. It allows you to upload a paper PDF, and will return the 10 most closely related papers according to the POPL/PLDI topic model. It could be a handy research tool. But, if nothing else, it's a fun way to see what else is related to a paper you're interested in.

Punctuated equilibrium in the large scale evolution of programming languages

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 18:58:41 +0000

Sergi Valverde and Ricard Solé, "Punctuated equilibrium in the large scale evolution of programming languages", SFI working paper 2014-09-030

Here we study the large scale historical development of programming languages, which have deeply marked social and technological advances in the last half century. We analyse their historical connections using network theory and reconstructed phylogenetic networks. Using both data analysis and network modelling, it is shown that their evolution is highly uneven, marked by innovation events where new languages are created out of improved combinations of different structural components belonging to previous languages. These radiation events occur in a bursty pattern and are tied to novel technological and social niches. The method can be extrapolated to other systems and consistently captures the major classes of languages and the widespread horizontal design exchanges, revealing a punctuated evolutionary path.

The results developed here are perhaps not that surprising to people familiar with the history of programming languages. But it's interesting to see it all formalized and analyzed.