Viewing profile — DaleBiagio

[dead]

Calm down dolebirchwood, not a bot

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 prog…

Appreciate you getting the source!

Definitely not a bot, I am however super interested in programming history!

Huh? How am I a bot account?

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

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…

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 hist…

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. T…

[dead]

haha, where is that quote from? Fantastic

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. JavaScri…

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 w…

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 o…

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…

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…

[dead]

[dead]

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 …