From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 20:26:09 +0100 From: Eris Discordia To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-ID: <2AEA3465D15A85AFAF21F1B3@[192.168.1.2]> In-Reply-To: <7359f0490909061103y78cfb3a4u8adf56d062e63695@mail.gmail.com> References: <7d3530220909050736h693c665ere5b8346c4569c7e1@mail.gmail.com> <3aaafc130909052123h2dacb56ck99d6a5302f972ae0@mail.gmail.com> <393394D0A7F3F4A227F94CDA@192.168.1.2> <7359f0490909061103y78cfb3a4u8adf56d062e63695@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Subject: Re: [9fans] nice quote Topicbox-Message-UUID: 66e67c26-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Thanks for the first-hand account :-) > Don't be Whiggish in your understanding of history. Its participants > did not know their way. Given your original narrative I really can't argue. Maybe, as you note, I'm wrongly assuming everyone knew a significant part of that which had come before them without accounting for natural propagation delays and barriers between thought pools. Nonetheless, it can't be denied a lot of ideas, and words used to denote them, in computation were conceived at earlier times than one might expect, sometimes even more comprehensively than today. For instance, von Foerster was consistently using "computing" in an astonishingly wide sense, e.g. bio-computing, by the 1950s. Even today most people don't immediately generalize that notion the way he did while such generalization is more than warranted. --On Sunday, September 06, 2009 11:03 -0700 Rob Pike wrote: >> Are you implying Doug McIlroy hadn't been taught about (and inevitably >> occupied by) Church-Turing Thesis or even before that Ackermann function >> and had to wait to be inspired by a comment in passing about FORTRAN to >> realize the importance of recursion?! This was a rhetorical question, of >> course. > > Doug loves that story. In the version he told me, he was a (math) grad > student at MIT in 1956 (before FORTRAN) and the discussion in the lab > was about computer subroutines - in assembly or machine language of > course. Someone mused about what might happen if a subroutine called > itself. Everyone looked bemused. The next day they all returned and > declared that they knew how to implement a subroutine that could call > itself although they had no idea what use it would be. "Recursion" > was not a word in computing. Hell, "computing" wasn't even much of a > word in math. > > Don't be Whiggish in your understanding of history. Its participants > did not know their way. > > -rob >