Observations, Reviews, and Essays
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By now it is difficult to imagine that once there was a time when the utility, and even the possibility, of recursion in programming was in doubt. Yet that was true of the programming community aro…
When the textile industry arose in the 18th century, craft was the norm in manufacturing. As the industrial revolution progressed, one after another sector of the economy made the transition from c…
1. Introduction Shortly after the death of E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), K.R. Apt wrote an obituary under the title Portrait of a Genius [1]. At the time it seemed to me a bit over the top. Now, with …
I’ve been reading a paper [1] written two decades ago, which itself is an account of events two decades before that. It is Alan Kay nominally writing about the history of a programming langua…
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…