Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.compilers > #2121 > unrolled thread

PhD or books on history of individual languages

Back to article view | Back to comp.compilers

Contents

  PhD or books on history of individual languages "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2018-11-22 14:41 +0000
    Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages Fernando <pronesto@gmail.com> - 2018-11-23 01:12 -0800
      Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2018-11-23 16:04 +0000
        Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages Louis Krupp <lkrupp@pssw.com> - 2018-11-23 15:17 -0700
          Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2018-11-24 19:49 +0000
            Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages Kaz Kylheku <157-073-9834@kylheku.com> - 2018-12-02 12:39 -0500
              Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2018-12-03 11:12 +0000
                Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2018-12-08 14:31 -0500
    Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages Nick <ibeam2000@gmail.com> - 2018-11-23 21:36 -0800
    Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages steve kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu> - 2018-11-24 18:58 +0000
      Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2018-11-25 00:57 +0000
        Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages Fernando <pronesto@gmail.com> - 2018-12-02 12:39 -0500
    Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages gah4@u.washington.edu - 2020-02-27 18:43 -0800
      Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2020-02-28 14:28 +0000
    Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages gah4@u.washington.edu - 2020-03-06 12:30 -0800
      Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages "Derek M. Jones" <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> - 2020-03-08 21:36 +0000
        Re: PhD or books on history of individual languages George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2020-03-09 07:33 -0400

#2121 — PhD or books on history of individual languages

All,

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).

I know of one such, for CHILL:
https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/94362

I have done the obvious searches on Fortran, Cobol
and APL.  There are plenty of papers, but no thesis
or books.

There is also Mark Priestly's Phd:
"LOGIC AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES, 1930–1975"
markpriestley.net/pdfs/phd.pdf

Pointers welcome.

[toc] | [next] | [standalone]

#2122

Hi Derek,

    I don't know if it fits your criteria, but are you aware of HOPL
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languages)? This
conference happens every 15 years. HOPL of year X talks about programming
languages created up to year X - 11 (or so). The proceedings contains papers
telling the history of individual programming languages, signed by the authors
of these languages themselves (well, I guess that's an "edited collections of
papers on different languages", but it's still super cool).

Regards,

Fernando
[HOPL is great and the papers are refereed, but they're papers, not books
or theses.  I don't ever recall seeing a thesis on specific programming
languages, but you could certainly get a few out of the tangled history
of Lisp.  -John]

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2123

Fernando,

>      I don't know if it fits your criteria, but are you aware of HOPL
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languages)? This

Yes, I know about the regular papers.

> or theses.  I don't ever recall seeing a thesis on specific programming
> languages, but you could certainly get a few out of the tangled history
> of Lisp.  -John]

I was surprised to see the thesis on CHILL (I once wrote a
CHILL front end) and thought there might be more.

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2124

On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 16:04:49 +0000, "Derek M. Jones"
<derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> wrote:

>Fernando,
>
>>      I don't know if it fits your criteria, but are you aware of HOPL
>> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languages)? This
>
>Yes, I know about the regular papers.
>
>> or theses.  I don't ever recall seeing a thesis on specific programming
>> languages, but you could certainly get a few out of the tangled history
>> of Lisp.  -John]
>
>I was surprised to see the thesis on CHILL (I once wrote a
>CHILL front end) and thought there might be more.

You might be the person to read some of those papers and write one of
those books. You'll have a perspective that the language designers
themselves might not have had.

Louis

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2127

Louis,

> You might be the person to read some of those papers and write one of
> those books. You'll have a perspective that the language designers
> themselves might not have had.

I have enough enthusiasm to read them, not write them.

Historians of computing tend to be primarily hardware based
https://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2018/03/13/historians-of-computing/

Social scientists and English majors are missing out on
writing about an unexplored area of knowledge.

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2130

On 2018-11-24, Derek M. Jones <derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> wrote:
> Louis,
>
>> You might be the person to read some of those papers and write one of
>> those books. You'll have a perspective that the language designers
>> themselves might not have had.
>
> I have enough enthusiasm to read them, not write them.
>
> Historians of computing tend to be primarily hardware based
> https://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2018/03/13/historians-of-computing/
>
> Social scientists and English majors are missing out on
> writing about an unexplored area of knowledge.

Which brings up the point that digging through historic programming
languages is not really Ph. D. level work in the field of Computer Science.

A Ph. D. thesis is supposed to be a body of research which broadens
human understanding in the subject domain.  Programming languages are
man-made stuff. They were understood quite well by their makers and
users. Someone trying to dig up info about some old language nobody uses
will end up with even less insight into it than the people who worked
with it and on it.

A survey of what cranes have been built by what machine companies, and
how they worked, wouldn't be Ph. D. work in civil engineering, would it?

[It's a fine topic for history of science, where there are plenty of
people working on computer history.  Look at the IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing. -John]

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2133

Kaz,

>> Social scientists and English majors are missing out on
>> writing about an unexplored area of knowledge.
>
> Which brings up the point that digging through historic programming
> languages is not really Ph. D. level work in the field of Computer Science.

I'm not suggesting that this topic is appropriate, or not, for any
academic discipline.

Historians of computing are starting to proliferate, but mostly
hardware at the moment:
https://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2018/03/13/historians-of-computing/
[There's plenty of software history in IEEE Annals.  The current issue is about
the history of desktop publishing, 2% about the typesetters and laser printers,
and 98% about the software. -John]

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2134

A. B. Tucker produced a book "Programming Languages" (McGraw-Hill, 1977)
covering in detail ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, RPG, and SNOBOL.

Example programs with timings are given for each language.

Timings for PL/I under the IBM compilers need to be taken wih a grain of salt,
for Tucker omitted to specify OPTIONS (REORDER) in all the procedures --
largely negating the effects of specifying optimisation.

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2125

For APL, see

http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/

particularly

http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APL.htm

This was Ken Iverson's original 1962 book which is rather far from
even early APL implementations.
[Iverson's book is sort of the opposite of a history.  It's about how one
might write a language like APL.  It is my impression that people were
surprised how well it turned into a working language, with excellent
multi user performance on late 1960s mainframes. -John]

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2126

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). ...

There is ZPL from the University of Washington.  See

https://research.cs.washington.edu/zpl/home/index.html
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bradc/cv/pubs/
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bradc/cv/pubs/degree/thesis.html

--
steve

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2128

Steve,

>> 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). ...
>
> There is ZPL from the University of Washington.  See
>
> https://research.cs.washington.edu/zpl/home/index.html

There are umpteen thesis that describe the design of yet
another language.

On the whole, the creation of new languages is vanity research,
and it's been going on for a long time:
http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2017/05/21/evidence-for-28-possible-compilers-in-1957/

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2131

The Modern Programming Languages book by Adam Webber contains a chapter (the
last chapter) called 'The History of Programming Languages'. He covers mostly
Prolog, ML and Java, which are the languages that he uses in the book. But he
goes briefly over other languages as well: Plankalkul, Fortran, Lisp, Algol
and Smalltalk.

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2465

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).

There is the "Handbook of Programming Languages", which is a four
volume set edited by Peter Salus.

Chapters are written by different people, but they are written as
chapters, not journal articles or conference papers.
(Though at some point there is overlap between them.)

The four volumes are:

I. Object-Oriented Programming Languages
II. Imperative Programming Languages
III. Little Languages and Tools
IV. Functional and Logic Programming Languages

This is from about 1998, which you might take into account, depending
on your idea of history.

They might be available used for low prices, depending on how many
people read this and rush out to buy them.

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2468

gah,

> There is the "Handbook of Programming Languages", which is a four
> volume set edited by Peter Salus.

Thanks.  Lots of second hand copies of volume II, Imperative
languages.

There are the HOPL conference talks, of which the evolution of
Lisp paper is by far the best:
www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf

--
Derek M. Jones
blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com
[At archive.org there are semi-legal scans of all four volumes
you can check out and read. -John]

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2479

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]

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2481

gah4,

> Another book that you might be interested in is:
>
>    "Programming Language Standardization"
                                     ^
                                     s

Amazon does not find it with the z spelling [see below -John]

There was an update in the September 1994 issue of
Computer Standards & Interfaces, devoted to programming
language standards.
I have a copy, but only because I wrote the C article.

> 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.

I'm not sure that can be said for Modula-2, whose fans thought it
was not popular yet because it did not have an ISO standard.

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

My copy of "Handbook of Programming languages vol 1, object-oriented
programming" has arrived, all 2.5 inches of thickness.

It's chapters are really extended marketing pieces by someone
involved in the language design.

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

Amazon lists a copy for £2.95.

It's surprising that nobody has written a PhD on Cobol or Fortran.
I'm sure it will happen eventually.

--
Derek M. Jones
blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com
[Amazon US doesn't find it with either spelling, Amazon UK finds three
copies including one in the US.  US library catalogs finds it spelled
with a z.  I've asked my library to borrow a copy for me.  -John]

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#2482

On Sun, 8 Mar 2020 21:36:31 +0000, "Derek M. Jones"
<derek@_NOSPAM_knosof.co.uk> wrote:

>> 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.
>
>I'm not sure that can be said for Modula-2, whose fans thought it
>was not popular yet because it did not have an ISO standard.

???  C was in use for 17 years before its standard appeared.  Modula-2
took 18 years, but that is directly comparable ... the committees move
at the speed of frozen molasses.


No the problem lay elsewhere:  IMO Modula-2 had a number of things
working against it right from the beginning.

Modula-2 was introduced in 1977, but few people knew anything about it
until Byte magazine devoted an edition to it in 1984.  By that time,
OOP was catching on everywhere and Modula-2 had to compete with both
Object Pascal and "C with Objects" (what became C++).  But Modula-2
was not OO and did not easily support it.  Modula-2 was an alternative
to C and Pascal, but not to C++ or Object Pascal.

And many Pascal programmers who might have switched to Modula-2 didn't
like its uppercase keywords.  The addition of compiler switches to
permit lowercase was only partly successful: for some time there were
issues mixing modules that were compiled differently.

Note that N.Wirth collaborated on the development of Object Pascal, so
it seems that he was well aware of the OO movement and that Modula-2
was intended for a different audience ... one that unfortunately never
materialized.


Modula-3 (which was from DEC-Olivetti, not N.Wirth) was a good
alternative to both C++ and Object Pascal, but it arrived too late to
make a difference.

YMMV,
George
[Having a standard is no guarantee of success.  Anyone here still
use Dibol?  INCITS 165-1992[S2007] -John]

[toc] | [prev] | [standalone]

Back to top | Article view | comp.compilers

csiph-web