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Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?

#3

Post by EdwardCoffin »

There's The Evolution of Lisp [1], which talks about the entwined relationship of many of the different dialects of lisp.

A History of Haskell [2]

The Early History of Smalltalk [3]

[1] http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...

[3] http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?

#4

Post by jsnell »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #3

There's The Evolution of Lisp [1], which talks about the entwined relationship of many of the different dialects of lisp. A History of Haskell [2] The Early History of Smalltalk [3] [1] http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... [3] http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

Everything from HOPL II is great. I don't know whether all of it ever got published online, but the book version is totally worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?

#5

Post by jcr »

These might be obvious already (and hence redundant), but many computer history museums have sections covering software and programming language history.

http://www.computerhistory.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_History_Museum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing

Also try the Internet Archive (archive.org). It has a lot of "Programming History" stuff, but finding it can be painful:

https://archive.org/details/Kfest2011-PeterNeubaueLogoHistor...

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?

#7

Post by LukeShu »

There's DMR's article on early C development[0], and the accompanying backups of C compilers from that era[1].

[0]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html [1]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/primevalC.html

There are several old primary resources on C's predecessor, B [2]. Structured programming was newish, so it's fun to read these descriptions of newfangled "while" loops.

[2]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bintro.html

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?

#8

Post by tikhonj »

If you really want to get into the details about a specific language, anything from the three "History of Programming Languages"[1] (HOPL) conferences is great. These conferences, convened every ~15 years, have talks by the creators of various seminal programming languages recounting their histories.

You can probably find most of the HOPL papers online as well as recordings of talks from the later conferences. There's a lot of material! Personally, I really liked "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class"[2][3], partly because I like Haskell and partly because Simon Peyton Jones is such an engaging speaker.

[1]: http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL.html

[2]: paper: http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/histor...

[3]: recorded talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bjXGrycMhQ

Re: Ask HN: What are some good resources on the history of programming languages?

#9

Post by johansch »

tikhonj wrote: post #8

If you really want to get into the details about a specific language, anything from the three "History of Programming Languages"[1] (HOPL) conferences is great. These conferences, convened every ~15 years, have talks by the creators of various seminal programming languages recounting their histories. You can probably find most of the HOPL papers online as well as recordings of talks from the later conferences. There'…

The book with papers from the second conference (in the 90s) is quite good:

http://www.amazon.com/History-Programming-Languages-Thomas-B...

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