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From: gah4@u.washington.edu
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 12:30:32 -0800 (PST)
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On Thursday, November 22, 2018 at 7:29:57 AM UTC-8, Derek M. Jones wrote:

> I'm looking for PhD thesis or books covering the history of
> popular, or once popular languages (not edited
> collections of papers on different languages).

Another book that you might be interested in is:

  "Programming Language Standardization"

edited by I.D. Hill and B.L.Meek.

It is less about language history, and more about standardization,
but with individual languages in the explanations.

It seems to be usual for a language to be in common use before
anyone gets around to writing a standard.  That complicates the
process.

But the process of standardization is connected to the history,
and much of that history comes through.  There are chapters on
Fortran, COBOL, ALGOL 60, PL/I, BASIC, PASCAL as specific examples,
and some more general categories, such as data base management
and OS command languages.

Chapters are written by different people, but in book style,
not journal article style.

[It was published by Ellis Harwood in 1980, long out of print, but in a fair
number of academic libraries. -John]