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* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation
@ 2021-11-16 17:00 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-11-16 17:54 ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ] Jon Steinhart
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 36+ 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] 36+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
@ 2021-11-16 19:29 Douglas McIlroy
  2021-11-16 19:54 ` Jon Steinhart
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 36+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-11-16 19:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> My belief is that perl was written to replace a lot of Unix pipelines,

I understand Perl's motive to have been a lot like PL/I's: subsume
several popular styles of programming in one language. PL/I's ensemble
wasn't always harmonious. Perl's was cacophony.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
@ 2021-11-18 18:47 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2021-11-18 19:03 ` arnold
  2021-11-18 21:42 ` Rich Morin
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS @ 2021-11-18 18:47 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list


Here’s another angle on Perl, perhaps more on topic for TUHS. Let’s accept for a minute that Perl filled the void between C and shell scripts, and that there was a latent need for a scripting language like this on Unix.

The shell, awk, sed, etc. had arrived at more or less fully formed versions by 1980. Perl (and TCL) did not appear until the very end of the 1980’s. What filled the gap in that decade, if anything?

Ancient Unix has ‘bs’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bs_(programming_language) but this seems to have had very little use.

Paul


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]
@ 2021-11-18 22:59 Nelson H. F. Beebe
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 36+ messages in thread
From: Nelson H. F. Beebe @ 2021-11-18 22:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

The discussions under this subject line have somewhat strayed from
Unix heritage issues, but because several people have contributed
views of assorted programming languages that mostly grew up on
Unix-family systems, I decided to add this memory.

Several years ago, I attended a talk by Dan McCracken (1930--2011),
noted book author in computer areas, and VP and later President of the
ACM (1978--1980).  His talk was about programming languages, and was
done in a question/answer format, with Dan offering both parts.

He began:

   Q: In 10 years, which of the following programming languages will
      still be in use:  Basic, Cobol, Fortran, PL/I, ....

   A: First of all, Basic is not a programming language.  Then ...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe@acm.org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 36+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2021-12-02 22:35 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 36+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2021-11-16 17:00 [TUHS] Book Recommendation Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 17:54 ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ] Jon Steinhart
2021-11-16 17:57   ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-16 18:00   ` Dan Cross
2021-11-16 18:04   ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-16 19:53     ` Richard Salz
2021-11-16 20:05       ` Warner Losh
2021-11-17 19:12   ` Norman Wilson
2021-11-17 20:46     ` Dan Stromberg
2021-11-17 20:52       ` Warner Losh
2021-11-17 21:17         ` Dan Cross
2021-11-17 22:21           ` Rob Pike
2021-11-18  0:35             ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-19 20:04               ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-19 20:14                 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-19 21:48                   ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-19 22:28                     ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-19 23:17               ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-18 21:03             ` George Michaelson
2021-11-18 21:39               ` Rob Pike
2021-11-17 22:36     ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-18  0:56       ` Dan Stromberg
     [not found] ` <CAKH6PiXinxBQGRqoeGMcG9CwTA5BNeU-LY164f-ZLYA4obsyuA@mail.g mail.com>
2021-11-16 18:47   ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation 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 19:29 [TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ] Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 19:54 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-18 18:47 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2021-11-18 19:03 ` arnold
2021-11-18 19:16   ` Chet Ramey
2021-11-18 19:20     ` arnold
2021-11-18 21:03   ` John Cowan
2021-11-18 21:42 ` Rich Morin
2021-11-18 22:59 Nelson H. F. Beebe

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