De Programmatica Ipsum is a magazine of essays on software history, programming culture and the industry.
HN commenters link it for pieces on Peter Norton and AppleScript's English-like design, while one says it overlooks JavaScript.
They do exist, but I do wish for more. We’re only a couple of decades away from software construction being a hundred years old (and a few from software _engineering_ being a century old) and I think it’d be wonderful to have some encyclopaedia-like resource that says “here’s everything we tried for the first hundred years, and why we do things this way at the end of it”.
For my part, I try to contextualise the way I/my peers work now with the other things we tried over my career, and maybe the decade or two before that which contextualised _my_ junior experience. For example, I run a monthly magazine with a colleague, and in our devops issue we discuss how ideas in DevOps come from manufacturing, from Rapid Application Development, and other inspiration (https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/play-it-again-sam/). I just recorded a podcast episode where I look at _what_ documentation was considered “comprehensive” at the time of the agile manifesto, and what docs are still useful despite the industry-wide tendency to eschew all prose (https://www.sicpers.info/podcast/episode-47-comprehensive-documentation/).
No, Brad Cox thought that the only way reuse could happen at scale would be via micropayments, which of the time he considered to be integral to the software IC idea:
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/brad-cox/
It turns out, of course, that the assumption was faults, and trying to track every dynamic use of software to pay its makers was completely impractical.
What actually happened is similar to what happened with tcp/ip. The phone companies couldn't see how it would be useful, because its lack of per packet accounting meant it couldn't charge for every packet. Instead, by throwing away all the complex accounting systems, TCP/IP could grow far behind what the phone system could do.
They mention only in passing arguably the most interesting and currently important language, not least due to its frantic evolutionary pace - Javascript. And only then via TypeScript, which may or may not be an improvement to the underlying language. They do link to their own page on Javascript, but that page is more a side swipe than a considered analysis: https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/innovationscript/
Software language theorists should (hold their nose and) take a very close look at Javascript.
There is a term-of-art for using English to write programs: "The English-Likeness Monster." The poster-boy for this terrible UX is--ironically--AppleScript, a programming language from a company that otherwise prides itself on good user experiences.
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-english-likeness-monster/
For assembly, by any chance, do you like the "pink shirt" book? It is one of my all-time favorites! I learned so much from it back in the day. Sadly, I lost my copy somewhere along the way :(
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/peter-norton/
It could be a deliberate rejection of the standard format of a blog. Here's the issue which seems like a less confusing starting point: https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/issue-58-community/