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* [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-11-14 14:37 Clem Cole
  2021-11-14 14:55 ` Dennis Boone
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 60+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2021-11-14 14:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

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I wanted to pass on a recommendation of a new book from MIT Press called:
“A New History of Computing” by Thomas Haigh and Paul Cerruzzi, ISBN
978-0-262-54299-0

Full disclosure, I reviewed a bit of it for them and have been eagerly
awaiting final publication.

I do expect a lot of the readers of this mailing list will enjoy it.  They
did a super job researching it and it’s very complete and of course,
interesting.  FWIW: the work of a number people that are part of this list
is nice chronicled.

Clem
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 60+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-11-16  3:16 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-11-16  4:08 ` G. Branden Robinson
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 60+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-11-16  3:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

While waiting to see the full text, I've poked around the index for
subjects of interest. It certainly is copious, and knows about a lot
of things that I don't.

The authors make a reasonable choice in identifying the dawn of
"modern computing" with Eniac and relegating non-electronic machines
to prehistory. Still, I was glad to find the prophetic Konrad Zuse
mentioned, but disappointed not to find the Bell Labs pioneer, George
Stibitz.

Among programming languages, Fortran, which changed the nature of
programming, is merely hinted at (buried in the forgettable Fortran
Monitoring System), while its insignificant offspring PL/I is present.
(Possibly this is an indexing oversight. John Backus, who led the
Fortran project, is mentioned quite early in the book.) Algol, Lisp,
Simula and Smalltalk quite properly make the list, but Basic rates
more coverage than any of them. C, obscurely alphabetized as "C
language", is treated generously, as is Unix in general.

Surprisingly there's almost nothing in the index about security or
privacy. The litany of whiggish chapters about various uses of
computers needs a cautionary complement. "The computer attracts crooks
and spies" would be a stylistically consistent title.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 60+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-11-16 14:57 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-11-16 15:22 ` Richard Salz
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 60+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-11-16 14:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

The following remark stirred old memories. Apologies for straying off
the path of TUHS.

> I have gotten the impression that [PL/I] was a language that was beloved by no one.

As I was a designer of PL/I, an implementer of EPL (the preliminary
PL/I compiler used to build Multics), and author of the first PL/I
program to appear in the ACM Collected Algorithms, it's a bit hard to
admit that PL/I was "insignificant". I'm proud, though, of having
conceived the SIGNAL statement, which pioneered exception handling,
and the USES and SETS attributes, which unfortunately sank into
oblivion. I also spurred Bud Lawson to invent -> for pointer-chasing.
The former notation C(B(A)) became A->B->C. This was PL/I's gift to C.

After the ACM program I never wrote another line of PL/I.
Gratification finally came forty years on when I met a retired
programmer who, unaware of my PL/I connection, volunteered that she
had loved PL/I above all other programming languages.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 60+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-11-16 17:00 Douglas McIlroy
       [not found] ` <CAKH6PiXinxBQGRqoeGMcG9CwTA5BNeU-LY164f-ZLYA4obsyuA@mail.g mail.com>
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 60+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-11-16 17:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

>> The former notation C(B(A)) became A->B->C. This was PL/I's gift to C.

> You seem to have a gift for notation. That's rare.  Curious what you think of APL?

I take credit as a go-between, not as an inventor. Ken Knowlton
introduced the notation ABC in BEFLIX, a pixel-based animation
language. Ken didn't need an operator because identifiers were single
letters. I showed Ken's scheme to Bud Lawson, the originator of PL/I's
pointer facility. Bud liked it and came up with the vivid -> notation
to accommodate longer identifiers.

If I had a real gift of notation I would have come up with the pipe
symbol. In my original notation ls|wc was written ls>wc>. Ken Thompson
invented | a couple of months later. That was so influential that
recently, in a paper that had nothing to do with Unix, I saw |
referred to as the "pipe character"!

APL is a fascinating invention, but can be so compact as to be
inscrutable. (I confess not to have practiced APL enough to become
fluent.) In the same vein, Haskell's powerful higher-level functions
make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large
code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional
programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for
improved readability.

Human impatience balks at tarrying over a saying that puts so much in
a small space. Yet it helps once you learn it. Try reading transcripts
of medieval Arabic algebra carried out in words rather than symbols.
Iverson's hardware descriptions in APL are another case where
symbology pays off.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 60+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-11-16 19:49 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-11-16 20:02 ` Dan Cross
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 60+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-11-16 19:49 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: jfoust, TUHS main list

>>I take credit as a go-between, not as an inventor. Ken Knowlton
>>introduced the notation ABC in BEFLIX, a pixel-based animation
>>language.

> In BEFLIX, 'ABC' meant what, exactly?  Offsets from pixel locations?

It meant exactly what A->B->C means in C. Pixels had properties,
represented in data structures. One valid data type was pointer.

Incidentally, another BEFLIX innovation was the buddy system for
dynamic storage allocation.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 60+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-11-24 15:50 Norman Wilson
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 60+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2021-11-24 15:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Larry McVoy:

  Say hi to Barry for me, I knew him back in the UUCP days, he was always
  pleasant.

====

And for me.  Knew him back in my DECUS days.  Also tell him
that since he runs the World, it's all his fault.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 60+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-12-03  2:50 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-12-06  4:25 ` Adam Thornton
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 60+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-12-03  2:50 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list, duncanmak

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/fission.pdf

Duncan Mak wrote

 > Haskell's powerful higher-level functions
> make middling fragments of code very clear, but can compress large
> code to opacity. Jeremy Gibbons, a high priest of functional
> programming, even wrote a paper about deconstructing such wonders for
> improved readability.
>

I went looking for this paper by Jeremy Gibbons here:
https://dblp.org/pid/53/1090.html but didn't find anything resembling it.

What's the name of the paper?

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 60+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2021-12-06  5:20 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 60+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2021-11-14 14:37 [TUHS] Book Recommendation Clem Cole
2021-11-14 14:55 ` Dennis Boone
2021-11-14 16:35   ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-11-14 18:20     ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-14 18:44     ` Clem Cole
2021-11-14 18:52       ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-11-14 19:27         ` Clem Cole
2021-11-15  9:49           ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-11-16  3:16 Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16  4:08 ` G. Branden Robinson
2021-11-16 14:56   ` Clem Cole
2021-11-16 15:37     ` Richard Salz
2021-11-16 15:50       ` Adam Thornton
2021-11-16 17:02     ` Will Senn
2021-11-16 21:38       ` John Cowan
2021-11-16 21:46         ` Will Senn
2021-11-16 18:27     ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-16 18:44       ` Heinz Lycklama
2021-11-16 14:57 Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 15:22 ` Richard Salz
2021-11-16 15:52 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23  2:28 ` Mary Ann Horton
2021-11-23  7:57   ` Henry Bent
2021-11-23  8:10     ` arnold
2021-11-23  8:28       ` Henry Bent
2021-11-23 17:26     ` Adam Thornton
2021-11-23 18:54       ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23 19:04         ` Al Kossow
2021-11-23 19:39           ` Lawrence Stewart
2021-11-23 19:08       ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23 21:54   ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-11-24 15:18     ` Richard Salz
2021-11-24 15:45       ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-24 18:34       ` Rich Morin
2021-11-24 18:40         ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-24 19:39           ` Clem Cole
2021-11-24 20:02             ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-25 10:26           ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-11-24 20:13       ` arnold
2021-11-24 20:18         ` Will Senn
2021-11-25  7:22         ` arnold
2021-11-24 20:15       ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 20:21         ` joe mcguckin
2021-11-24 20:27         ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 21:27           ` Richard Salz
2021-11-24 22:19       ` Charles Anthony
2021-11-16 17:00 Douglas McIlroy
     [not found] ` <CAKH6PiXinxBQGRqoeGMcG9CwTA5BNeU-LY164f-ZLYA4obsyuA@mail.g mail.com>
2021-11-16 18:47   ` John Foust via TUHS
2021-11-16 20:35 ` Bakul Shah
2021-12-02 21:35 ` Duncan Mak
2021-12-02 22:32   ` Bakul Shah
2021-12-02 22:34   ` Rob Pike
2021-11-16 19:49 Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 20:02 ` Dan Cross
2021-11-16 23:16   ` Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-24 15:50 Norman Wilson
2021-12-03  2:50 Douglas McIlroy
2021-12-06  4:25 ` Adam Thornton
2021-12-06  4:42   ` Dan Halbert
2021-12-06  5:18     ` Charles H. Sauer

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