Le 30/08/2015 03:29, Donn Cave a écrit :
I was already 4 when Lisp was invented, so computer programming pedagogy when I was born - that must have been a dry job Dry job?... I don't think so. It was a glorious period, I think. Some years later as well.
My first language (learnt and also taught some years later) was Algol60 [replaced very soon by Fortran]. The relationship between our computation needs and the coding styles, paradigms, algorithm structuring, etc. was quite obscure at the time, and our main source of inspiration was the collection of algorithms in CACM, published in Algol. I suspect strongly that those - fundamental AND practical - materials conditioned the opinion of the community (at least mine: physicists) about "what is needed, and what should be taught" (and perhaps also "what is elegant"). Moreover, they played (I am not certain) a significant role in specifying what should be the "main stream" of languages, and gave a strong push to the development of compilers of all them -- Jovial, Pascal, C, Java... If, at the beginning of the '60ties, the Lisp community had published more code recipes, more algorithm presentations, more practical functional codes, perhaps the evolution of programming languages would be different. Perhaps the evolution of computer architectures would be also a bit different (more importance for hardware stack architectures) We have seen some nice psychological paradoxes. Anthony Hearn told me that he recognized the importance of Lisp for the symbolic computations very early, but he found out that his colleagues abhorred its syntax so strongly, that his Computer Algebra package Reduce became Lisp disguised in an Algolish language... Now, the Beauty and the Beast, where were they?... On the other hand, around 1963, Martinus Veltman (his Nobel had to wait more 36 years...) found out that the "fast", and low level Fortran for such needs was useful as well, but as an implementation platform, not the front-end. He conceived his computer algebra system Schoonschip (name chosen "among others to annoy everybody not Dutch", quote from Wikipedia, probably authentic, knowing the personal character of Veltman) upon Fortran, and assembly language, but he manufactured a *rewriting system*, completely different from any other language! The result was that for many years only theoretical physicists used it, because it worked, but others (e.g. people from an engineering school to whom I proposed a course of Schoonschip) refused to touch the "monster". Well..., this "monster" evolved to FORM of Jos Vermaseren (also initially coded in Fortran, it still exists and is used). It inspired Cole and Wolfram at Caltech in their work on the computer algebra rewriting system SMP, that you know well. Oh, you don't? Yes, you do, only that it is called now "Mathematica". You don't use it? But you *DO USE* another rewriting system, only perhaps you don't know that it is one. It is called TeX... I repeat again: Programming languages evolve as the Culture does, with redundancies, inspirations, contradictions, and re-discoveries of the same paradigms several times. (Some people teach Prolog and say that it was the first known language which used logical non-determinism. But Colmerauer began to work on it at the beginning of '70, while Snobol was there for almost 10 years, and Griswold introduced into it the non-deterministic string-processing algorithms since the beginning.) I find it pityful that nowadays some young people learn 2 - 3 programming languages, and quarrel about which one is "better" or "worse"... Recall please one silly discussion between Van Gogh and Gauguin, when Van Gogh accused Gauguin that he gets everything false, that his world is flat, which is ugly and silly. Gauguin answered that the world *IS* flat, and that all these pointilistic details of Van Gogh are useless, false, and go nowhere. Well, both masters are great and they are still with us. Their discussion, perhaps invented, is almost forgotten, but it can be used as a /memento/. Their colours remain. Be colourful! == Jerzy Karczmarczuk /Caen, France/