Selected Papers on Computer Languages

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1. svatJun 2022
   Wow, this is a talk from June 1976. After this talk he published it as “The early development of programming languages” with Luis Trabb Pardo as a Stanford report in August 1976 (available online e.g. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA032123), then "for real" as a contribution to a 1977 encyclopedia, and the definitive version collected as Chapter 1 of his "Selected Papers on Computer Languages". When that collection came out in 2003, he gave a talk at the Computer History Museum, under the title "A Dozen Precursors of Fortran", available here: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262213... as a .wmv file; I've also reuploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGt86UHRAXY

   Talk description:

   > The history of a subject helps us not only to understand how the important ideas were born but also to appreciate the amount of progress that has been made. The history of programming languages is a striking example, because basic concepts that we now regard as self-evident were by no means obvious a priori; many years of hard work by brilliant and dedicated people were necessary before these basic principles were learned.

   > This talk will discuss contributions of Zuse (1945), Goldstine and von Neumann (1946), Curry (1948), Mauchly et al (1949), Burks (1950), Wheeler (1951), Rutishauser (1951), Böhm (1951), Glennie (1952), Hopper et al (1953), Laning and Zierler (1953), Brooker (1954), Kaminynin and Ljubimskiy (1954), Ershov (1955), Grems and Porter (1955), Elsworth et al (1955), Blum (1956), Perlis et al (1956), Katz et al (1956), Bauer and Samelson (1956), Melahn et al (1956), as well as the prototype of FORTRAN developed by Backus et al from 1954 to 1957. At least a dozen of these efforts will be illustrated by showing how a particular procedure called the TPK algorithm might have been coded at the time.

   It may be interesting to watch this 1976 talk and the 2003 talk, and see if anything has changed in the history. :-)

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2. svatJan 2021
   This is a paper by Donald Knuth and his student Luis Trabb Pardo, and the published version has a more readable reprint: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0.50019-8 (without paywall: http://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-491650-0...). See also someone's blog post: https://gregorias.github.io/2014/11/22/early-high-level-prog...

   There's also a video version of this paper: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262213... — This is a nice talk (~80 minutes followed by ~30 minutes of Q&A) that Donald Knuth gave on 2003-December-03 at the Computer History Museum. This paper was reprinted with corrections/updates as pages 1 to 93 of "Selected Papers on Computer Languages" (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers), and the talk was given shortly after this book came out, so he spoke about the first chapter of the book.

   The clever idea here is to illustrate (very) early programming languages from their first decade (roughly 1947 to 1957), by writing the same program ("TPK") in each of them. A while ago I added a little bit about it to the lede of https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TPK_algorithm&old...

   What it reveals is that many ideas of programming languages that we now consider obvious in fact took a long time and many people to be developed. The early programming languages did not look at all like languages have looked, more or less, since 1958 (when both ALGOL and LISP were introduced).

   > This talk will discuss contributions of Zuse (1945), Goldstine and von Neumann (1946), Curry (1948), Mauchly et al (1949), Burks (1950), Wheeler (1951), Rutishauser (1951), Böhm (1951), Glennie (1952), Hopper et al (1953), Laning and Zierler (1953), Brooker (1954), Kaminynin and Ljubimskiy (1954), Ershov (1955), Grems and Porter (1955), Elsworth et al (1955), Blum (1956), Perlis et al (1956), Katz et al (1956), Bauer and Samelson (1956), Melahn et al (1956), as well as the prototype of FORTRAN developed by Backus et al from 1954 to 1957. At least a dozen of these efforts will be illustrated by showing how a particular procedure called the TPK algorithm might have been coded at the time.

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3. svatDec 2019
   See also the paper by Knuth and his student Luis Trabb Pardo, "The Early Development of Programming Languages" (1976) -- its long story ends in 1957, the year this speculation is about. There's a typewritten version available online (e.g. at http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/stanford/cs_techRepor...) (TeX didn't exist yet), but a nicely typeset (and slightly updated) version occupies pages 1 to 93 of Knuth's Selected Papers on Computer Languages (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers).

   The many programming languages/systems described in that article go by various names like "automatic coding" and whatnot. For example, Burks in 1950 used "intermediate program language" (as something above the "internal program language"). (The PDF linked above actually uses "intermediate programming language" but the more recent printed book uses "intermediate program language" so that's probably correct.)

   I confess I haven't properly read the Knuth and Trabb-Pardo article yet... maybe there's a historical mention of the actual term "programming language" in there somewhere.

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4. taericSep 2017
   I just picked up Knuth's Selected Papers on Computer Languages[1] which has some fun exploration of this topic. Mostly, I will confess, much denser than I am probably prepared for. The initial essay on languages before the 1950s was remarkably interesting. In particular, to see some of the early languages mathematicians were using.

   [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Selected-Papers-Computer-Languages-...

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5. mahmudJan 2010
   His book "Selected Papers on Computer Languages" collects a few more papers that provide more context for the discover and subsequent application of the invention of attribute grammars.
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