DaleBiagio

7 ms·

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The creators of SQL, C++, CUDA, Haskell reviewed my book on Programming History(helloworldthebook.com)
4 points by DaleBiagio 4mo ago|0 comments
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Calm down dolebirchwood, not a bot
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Survivorship bias is exactly right. The C and assembly programs we still use are the ones that were good enough to last. The thousands that weren't are gone. Nobody counts the programs that were never finished because the language made
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Appreciate you getting the source!
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Definitely not a bot, I am however super interested in programming history!
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Huh? How am I a bot account?
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
[flagged]
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Hopper's trajectory from the Mark I to FLOW-MATIC to COBOL is one of the great arcs in computing. She had to fight to convince people that programs could be written in English-like words, her colleagues thought the idea was absurd beca
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
That's a fascinating detail! Do you know which machine? The transition period where patch cables and stored programs coexisted is one of the most interesting eras in computing history.
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
The ENIAC women's story is especially striking because they were classified as "sub-professional". The hardware was the prestigious work, the programming was considered clerical. That framing took decades to reverse.
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
haha, where is that quote from? Fantastic
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
ALGOL (1960) used semicolons as separators. C made them terminators. Every language since has had to pick a side, and "optional" always turns out to be the hardest choice. JavaScript's ASI is what happens when a 10 day langu
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
This tension is as old as programming itself. Dijkstra and Hoare spent decades arguing for rigor. Meanwhile C, JavaScript, and PHP, none of them designed for correctness, won the world. The languages that ship always beat the languages th
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
JSON's dominance is one of the most accidental success stories in computing. Douglas Crockford didn't design it — he said he "discovered" it. It was already there in JavaScript's object literal syntax, which itself
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring p
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
The PLATO connection is the best part of this piece. PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967. It's one of the earliest examples of a domain
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Meyer makes an important point that often gets lost: the null pointer predates Hoare. NIL existed in McCarthy's Lisp in 1959, six years before Hoare added null references to ALGOL W. The "mistake," if it was one, was already
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
" 9. It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures." That's great
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
The attribution to Hoare is a common error — "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" first appeared in Knuth's 1974 paper "Structured Programming with go to Statements." Knuth later attributed it to Hoare,
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by DaleBiagio 6mo ago
Hoare's influence extends much further than Quicksort and null. His work on ALGOL W with Wirth — rejected by the committee — led directly to Pascal. Meanwhile ALGOL 60, which he helped maintain, shaped the entire C lineage: ALGOL → CPL