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2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2021
1:02:27 · 28K views · Jan 11, 2018
Kevlin Henney argues that procedural programming never went away despite later paradigms such as OO and functional. He traces the history of structured programming and shows where procedural thinking still lives in modern code and why it matters for readability.
HN people recommend it as a fascinating history lesson showing that the field keeps rediscovering ideas from the 1960s.
7 comments from Hacker News
I strongly recommend this talk by software consultant and author Kevlin Henney called Procedural Programming: It's Back? It Never Went Away He talks a bit out Algol 68 and how influential it was on programming language design. Many language keywords we're familiar with today originated in the 50 year old language specification for Algol 68: int, bool, skip, void, struct. Here's the snippet from the talk about Algol 68 - it's brilliant: this video
I really liked this talk about the history of programming and how so many ideas we consider recent or modern are in fact much older than many of us realise. Watching this talk merely amplifies the feeling that the programming profession is in a perpetual loop - discarding or forgetting ideas or concepts, then re-discovering them anew. What's also striking is how rich and varied were the programming ideas that emerged from the 60s and 70s. Kevlin Henney - Procedural Programming: It's Back? It Never Went Away this video
You may appreciate Kevlin Henney's talk, "Procedural Programming - It's back? It never went away."[1] It's a tour of how all the best discoveries of the past decade or two really date back to the 1960s. [1] this video this video
If you have an interest in the history of programming methodologies, this talk is fascinating: Procedural programming: it's back? It never went away this video
I will start with a couple clarifications, in good faith. I will admit that I have made lazy errors in this discussion. Specifically in regard to terminology. Afaik, there is no term for "temporally unsynchronized" other than parallelism or concurrency, and I have misused the term concurrency at times. I have also used the term transition to mean "asynchronous state transition". This may clarify my past statements, but I will attempt to do better, going forward. So I'll visit on the material you are most familiar with so that my comments might have the most specific impact or irrelevance. For your verification, I read your paper here: [LINK] To begin, I agree on the concept. If "constraining architecture" means any separation of concerns or interface. To demonstrate that I did read through the code snippets you provided and completely irrelevant to the points being discussed, I believe there was an error in the code you posted in Listing 8@p.136 - - k: degreesK { self basicC :( degreesF - 273.15. \*wat?\* ivar : ui / celsiusTextField / intValue := self c . ivar : ui / fahrenheitTextField / intValue := self f. } I also thought the implementation was a little muddled and would implement a solution similar to this^. Object subclass: #Temperatures { var c. -changedC : sender { self c: sender intValue. self updateValues: { #val : c, #type: 'Celcius' }. } -changedF : sender { self f: sender intValue. self updateValues: { #val : f, #type: 'Farenheit' }. } -changedK : sender { self k