10 ms·

Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died

429 points by andrewbinstock 9y ago

EamonnMR 9y ago
Her work on the History of Programming Languages conference is enlightening. Good reading if you can get a hold of it. http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL-I.html http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL-I.html
- WalterGR 9y ago
  Good reading if you can get a hold of it. Many public library systems have inter-library loan arrangements with universities. This is a great way to get access to research works like the HOPL proceedings. (I live in Montgomery County Maryland and just checked to see if I can get them via my local public library branch. Yup.)
StevePerkins 9y ago
I've been watching a TV called "Halt and Catch Fire", about the early PC industry in the 1980's. I've enjoyed it very much, but sometimes I feel like the writers sacrifice historical plausibility to create strong female leads for a contemporary audience. Ironically, so many of the GIANTS of computing's earliest days were female. Even at the rank-and-file level, women made up an astonishing number of early programmers. If you talk to retirement age people in our field, you'll find that mainframe developers were commonly female all through the 1960's and 1970's. It wasn't until the PC revolution that the field shifted to become more exclusively male. I wonder when we'll see writers and TV/film producers start to explore that period of history? I'm sure there are some amazing stories that could be told. The crazy thing is, even if you just presented the field as-is without any embellishment, most people would assume that you were re-writing history in the name of political correctness. Most of the general public (hell, most young professionals in our field) just has no idea about this.
- pacaro 9y ago
  My mother was a programmer in the mid to late 60s, a job at which she met my father — at the time married with four children. They were married in September 1969, a month before my brother was born. I doubt that my siblings and I are the only 40-something children of two programmers, but I suspect that there are fewer 30-somethings that can say the same thing
  - eleumik 9y ago
    probably not the only ones but the first I hear of, you and your brothers also programmers ?
    - pacaro 9y ago
      My older brother is an IT manager, I'm a Principal Engineer at Amazon, my sister has worked variously in real estate, finance, and education. Of my four half-brothers, I believe that two work in the industry (we're not close). One certainly wrote a book on X programming before I even knew what X was!
      - eleumik 9y ago
        fantastic ;-)
  - drakonka 9y ago
    I'm 28 and both of my parents were engineers back in Ukraine (at the time Soviet Union). My dad was not primarily a programmer (ended up becoming a marine surveyor), but I am fairly sure he had to be involved with it at some point in his studies and career back then. I remember my mom would bring stacks upon stacks of used punched cards for us to doodle on to avoid wasting blank paper.
- FanaHOVA 9y ago
  Also see "Hidden Figures" for a real story about undervalued women (or at least at first) in the science field.
atemerev 9y ago
Cobol's legacy lives as PL/SQL, ABAP, and other enterprise data handling languages. While everybody is quick to point that this is not "real programming", they required astonishing amounts of engineering efforts to make things work. I would love to see a decent, modernized COBOL -- the same way they have modernized Fortran, so it is now a pretty decent numerical computing language. It would be a great hit.
- johnhattan 9y ago
  COBOL has been "modernized" quite a few times, but the syntax still looks pretty archaic, most likely to avoid breaking too much existing code. I'm sure backward compatibility is of paramount importance for it. I saw that there's a version that compiles to .NET bytecode, so you could conceivably write an XBox game in COBOL.
  - Stratoscope 9y ago
    Visual COBOL: https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/ https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/ Compiles to native code, JVM bytecode, or MSIL (.NET).
- gaius 9y ago
  PL/SQL is a descendant of Ada rather than COBOL, and it's at least as much real programming as making web stuff.
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    And Ada syntax is in turn derived from Pascal.
- jetti 9y ago
  COBOL 2002 is object oriented. Not sure if that is what you mean by modernized and I'm also not sure how many people actually use it. I have the specification for COBOL 2002 and have been meaning to write a compiler for it but just haven't taken the time to sit down and actually do it (especially because there is no simple BNF grammar in the spec and I'd have to piece it all together).
nooyurrsdey 9y ago
She had a large impact on modern business. My own mother works in IT and writes COBOL for a living. Thanks for your contribution, Mrs. Sammet
martincmartin 9y ago
HN should have a black bar in honor of this.
- pccampbell 9y ago
  +1 to this.
- alpb 9y ago
  She passed away May 21, which is 2 weeks ago, so this is not exactly news I am afraid.
rory096 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437092
killin_dan 9y ago
No black bar? There's billions of lines of COBOL throughout the world. BILLIONS!
smarks 9y ago
Although Ms. Sammet's passing has been previously discussed here on HN, this new NYT article provides a different and somewhat more colorful perspective on the life of this remarkable woman. Worth a read.
the_hn_sux 9y ago
> More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are now in use and an estimated 2 billion lines are added or changed each year, according to IBM Research. Woah there, I would have never imagined that.
maxharris 9y ago
Dijkstra said it best in 1975: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/E... And before you get angry at me, answer this simple question: have you actually ever used COBOL? I spent a year of my life translating a COBOL mess into Delphi. It was horrible - the code I was working with had no functions (unless you think of a module defined in an entire file as a function), global scope on variables, and tons of ugly COBOL boilerplate, as dictated by the language. And it's no surprise that COBOL was a historical dead-end. Unlike FORTRAN and Lisp, it begat nothing. That's why I'm hard-pressed to venerate anyone that had anything to do with perpetuating that mess.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Being a cynic is easy. Which programming language(s) did Dijkstra promote?
  - maxharris 9y ago
    Apparently it changed over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373443 https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2006/05/31/rediscovering-dr-dijkstra-and-giving-lisp-a-second-chance/ https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2006/05/31/rediscovering-dr-dij...
- nn3 9y ago
  >Unlike FORTRAN and Lisp, it begat nothing. Which programming language was begat by FORTRAN? The ALGOL family seems rather independent to me. Both FORTRAN and COBOL had the misfortune to be created before structured programming. Others, like FORTH and LISP were lucky that they are flexible enough to easily add new programming conventions. You could probably say that modern report generators were begat by COBOL to some degree (even though FORTRAN had formatted output too) It seems programming languages designed to be "easy to use" suffer from lots of people writing really terrible code with it. Excel or VB have similar issues.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
jxub 9y ago
To like COBOL, you need to posess a particular kind of rigid corporate mindset. I wonder whether it's fathers/mothers had the mentioned physic structure, or it was a fruit of 50's salaryman mental subjugation. No offense ment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 9y ago
  Or was it a product of the computers at the time? Here's a 1959 computer, donated to a school in 1965. This was filmed in 1969. One of the children wrote a language - minigol - so the younger children didn't have to use assembler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI Just turning the machine on requires coordination between several people using intercom.
  - coreyp_1 9y ago
    Thank you for the video! It was interesting to see the binary adding exercise!
- brians 9y ago
  Or perhaps you need to be a frustrated machine language programmer?
- throwawayhf 9y ago
  2030: "To like Perl, you need to possess a particular kind of BOFH mindset, a fruit of an 80s abused nerd mental subjugation." 2050: "To like Roar and Yavascript, you need to possess a particular kind of startup bro mindset, a fruit of a 10s ZIRP mental subjugation." Well, Alan Kay already said it better. "Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]..."
- xxxxxxxx 9y ago
breck 9y ago
Her book "Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals" is not available as an eBook and is out of print and costs over $100 used on Amazon. Would be great if there was a cheaper way to read it.
- breck 9y ago
  Though it looks only useful for the listing and factual description of languages at that time: 47[12].- -JEAN E. SAMMET, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1969, xxx $ 785 pp., 24 cm. Price $18.00 ($13.50 student edition). Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals is a monumental and encyclopedic treatment of its field. The primary aim of the book, as stated by the author, is to provide, ". . . in one place, and in a consistent fashion, fundamental information on programming languages, including history, general characteristics, similarities,'and differences." This aim has without doubt been achieved, and achieved well. A second aim is"... to provide specific basic information on all the significant, and most of the minor, higher level languages developed in the United States." This aim also has been achieved; there is an impressive collection of about 120 languages described in varying amounts of detail. The book is organized into three introductory chapters, six chapters on languages grouped more or less according to application areas, and two chapters on unimplemented concepts and future long-range developments. The organization is well thought out and suits the author's purposes admirably. The first chapter is devoted to defining what is meant by a programming language, to pros and cons of higherlevel languages, to classifying and categorizing languages, and to a presentation of factors influencing the choice of a language. Omitted from consideration are most European programming languages, and certain languages that are not, by the author's definition, higher-level programming languages, e.g., Report Generator, Autocoder, APL and SLIP. The second and third chapters are devoted to describing functional and technical characteristics of programming languages, partly with the aim of developing a format for the later discussions of specific languages. Functional characteristics, roughly, are the historical, political, economic, and pragmatic aspects of a language, i.e., those that are not part of its definition. Technical characteristics have to do with the actual syntax and semantics of the language. This outline of discussion is spelled out in some detail and generally adhered to in the sequel. The fact that approximately equal amounts of space are devoted to functional and technical characteristics is an indicator of the tone of the discussion. The author does not attempt to teach the reader how to program in any of the languages discussed, and indeed, one certainly would not learn programming from this book. As a reference work for background on specific programming languages, the book is a success. As a textbook on programming languages as a field of study, it is not. The tone of the introductory chapters is too platitudinous, and the technical information, both in depth and in organization, is inadequate to the task of imparting a feeling for what programming languages are all about. The difficulty is that this feeling can ultimately be achieved only by actually writing programs in various languages and thus coming to appreciate their fine points. Thus, the uniformity of organization across languages is achieved at the cost of omitting really deep examination of a few of them. The chapter on technical characteristics attempts to raise the issues of what choices a language designer must make, but the question of how, historically, they have been made is scattered among the different language discussions and never really explored in depth. Questions such as scoping rules, extensibility, and the structuring of data aggregates are never treated in a unified way, and the material on minor languages and on functional characteristics tends to deemphasize the importance of the technical characteristics of the major languages. There are no exercises in the book, and, indeed, the material provides no basis for exercises. In summary: Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals is a fine source for factual knowledge, but a poor source for gaining understanding. PAUL ABRAHAMS
ninjakeyboard 9y ago
Black-bar worthy?
rams 9y ago
Fred Brooks on COBOL - https://cycle-gap.blogspot.in/2009/08/fred-brooks-on-cobols-success.html https://cycle-gap.blogspot.in/2009/08/fred-brooks-on-cobols-...
maxharris 9y ago
"I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language." http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
- intopieces 9y ago
  What is this point of this quote? I downvoted this comment because it does not contribute to the discussion. A common tactic is to post a quote, wait for people to refute the most common/charitable interpretation of the quote's meaning in the context of discussion, then to reply with "that's not what I meant" and end it satisfied. So tell us, what is the point of bringing up this quote?
  - moxious 9y ago
    Poster isn't biting on this request. Somewhat ironically the quote is sourced from an article about a disfavored language arguing why cobol should be a disfavored language. Engineering is subject still to styles and fads, I guess the quote is just furthering that general mentality. COBOL isn't "cool" whatever that should mean.
- ckarmann 9y ago
  The purpose of species is to reproduce themselves. The purpose of programming languages is not to produce other languages but to write software. It seems Cobol served this purpose well at the time.
stesch 9y ago
DISPLAY SPACES UPON CRT.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nthcolumn 9y ago
COBOL was a foundation language in CS101 30 years ago and it was outdated then. There were jobs in legacy COBOL. Probably still are. It sucked but not as hard as RPG II.
edtechdev 9y ago
She proposed natural language programming over 50 years ago. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365274 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365274 There still hasn't been a whole lot of progress, although there have been some research projects and some closed source applications like Inform7 and WolframAlpha.
- mindcrime 9y ago
  although there have been some research projects and some closed source applications like Inform7 and WolframAlpha. Just as an FYI, Inform7[1] is - according to Wikipedia anyway - available under the Artistic License[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License
  - rsaarelm 9y ago
    The most interesting part that translates the natural language Inform 7 code to the more traditional Inform 6 code has not been open sourced. Graham Nelson talked about wanting to release the code as literate programs[1]. Currently the status of the publishable release for the ni compiler component is "as of April 2009, about two-thirds done"[2]. [1]: http://inform7.com/sources/inweb/ http://inform7.com/sources/inweb/ [2]: http://inform7.com/sources/webs/ http://inform7.com/sources/webs/
    - mindcrime 9y ago
      Currently the status of the publishable release for the ni compiler component is "as of April 2009, about two-thirds done" Blimey. :-( Here's hoping it sees the light of day at some point!
Pxtl 9y ago
I guess it says something sad about my prejudices that I saw the name "Jean" and assumed it was a man's name. I forgot that the field was so much more inclusive of women back then.
- herpderperator 9y ago
  Don't feel bad. She finds it funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv4KrY9GhQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv4KrY9GhQQ
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ams6110 9y ago
  I would assume "Jean" to be a woman and "Gene" to be a man.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    I was thinking French. I kept seeing notable programmers with female-sounding names like Jan and then realizing it was a non-Anglophonic man's name that's spelled like an English woman's name.
cobol999 9y ago
Janet your contribution to Software Industry will always be remembered. I really love Cobol. We developers salute to you. RIP Sr. Vice President - IT GIIM https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/general-management/ngiimic-chandresh-jain/ https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/gene... www.sc-digital-engineering.com
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cobol9999 9y ago
Jean Sammet- Your contribution to Software Industry will always be remembered. I really love Cobol. We developers salute to you. RIP Sr. Vice President - IT https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/general-management/ngiimic-chandresh-jain/ https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/gene... www.sc-digital-engineering.com
cobol9999 9y ago
Jean Sammet- Your contribution to Software Industry will always be remembered. I really love Cobol. We developers salute to you. RIP Sr. Vice President - IT https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/general-management/ngiimic-chandresh-jain/ https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/gene... www.sc-digital-engineering.com

Her work on the History of Programming Languages conference is enlightening. Good reading if you can get a hold of it. http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL-I.html http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL-I.html

WalterGR 9y ago
Good reading if you can get a hold of it. Many public library systems have inter-library loan arrangements with universities. This is a great way to get access to research works like the HOPL proceedings. (I live in Montgomery County Maryland and just checked to see if I can get them via my local public library branch. Yup.)

StevePerkins 9y ago

I've been watching a TV called "Halt and Catch Fire", about the early PC industry in the 1980's. I've enjoyed it very much, but sometimes I feel like the writers sacrifice historical plausibility to create strong female leads for a contemporary audience. Ironically, so many of the GIANTS of computing's earliest days were female. Even at the rank-and-file level, women made up an astonishing number of early programmers. If you talk to retirement age people in our field, you'll find that mainframe developers were commonly female all through the 1960's and 1970's. It wasn't until the PC revolution that the field shifted to become more exclusively male. I wonder when we'll see writers and TV/film producers start to explore that period of history? I'm sure there are some amazing stories that could be told. The crazy thing is, even if you just presented the field as-is without any embellishment, most people would assume that you were re-writing history in the name of political correctness. Most of the general public (hell, most young professionals in our field) just has no idea about this.

pacaro 9y ago
My mother was a programmer in the mid to late 60s, a job at which she met my father — at the time married with four children. They were married in September 1969, a month before my brother was born. I doubt that my siblings and I are the only 40-something children of two programmers, but I suspect that there are fewer 30-somethings that can say the same thing
- eleumik 9y ago
  probably not the only ones but the first I hear of, you and your brothers also programmers ?
  - pacaro 9y ago
    My older brother is an IT manager, I'm a Principal Engineer at Amazon, my sister has worked variously in real estate, finance, and education. Of my four half-brothers, I believe that two work in the industry (we're not close). One certainly wrote a book on X programming before I even knew what X was!
    - eleumik 9y ago
      fantastic ;-)
- drakonka 9y ago
  I'm 28 and both of my parents were engineers back in Ukraine (at the time Soviet Union). My dad was not primarily a programmer (ended up becoming a marine surveyor), but I am fairly sure he had to be involved with it at some point in his studies and career back then. I remember my mom would bring stacks upon stacks of used punched cards for us to doodle on to avoid wasting blank paper.
FanaHOVA 9y ago
Also see "Hidden Figures" for a real story about undervalued women (or at least at first) in the science field.

atemerev 9y ago

Cobol's legacy lives as PL/SQL, ABAP, and other enterprise data handling languages. While everybody is quick to point that this is not "real programming", they required astonishing amounts of engineering efforts to make things work. I would love to see a decent, modernized COBOL -- the same way they have modernized Fortran, so it is now a pretty decent numerical computing language. It would be a great hit.

johnhattan 9y ago
COBOL has been "modernized" quite a few times, but the syntax still looks pretty archaic, most likely to avoid breaking too much existing code. I'm sure backward compatibility is of paramount importance for it. I saw that there's a version that compiles to .NET bytecode, so you could conceivably write an XBox game in COBOL.
- Stratoscope 9y ago
  Visual COBOL: https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/ https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/ Compiles to native code, JVM bytecode, or MSIL (.NET).
gaius 9y ago
PL/SQL is a descendant of Ada rather than COBOL, and it's at least as much real programming as making web stuff.
- smitherfield 9y ago
  And Ada syntax is in turn derived from Pascal.
jetti 9y ago
COBOL 2002 is object oriented. Not sure if that is what you mean by modernized and I'm also not sure how many people actually use it. I have the specification for COBOL 2002 and have been meaning to write a compiler for it but just haven't taken the time to sit down and actually do it (especially because there is no simple BNF grammar in the spec and I'd have to piece it all together).

nooyurrsdey 9y ago

She had a large impact on modern business. My own mother works in IT and writes COBOL for a living. Thanks for your contribution, Mrs. Sammet

martincmartin 9y ago

HN should have a black bar in honor of this.

pccampbell 9y ago
+1 to this.
alpb 9y ago
She passed away May 21, which is 2 weeks ago, so this is not exactly news I am afraid.

rory096 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437092

killin_dan 9y ago

No black bar? There's billions of lines of COBOL throughout the world. BILLIONS!

smarks 9y ago

Although Ms. Sammet's passing has been previously discussed here on HN, this new NYT article provides a different and somewhat more colorful perspective on the life of this remarkable woman. Worth a read.

the_hn_sux 9y ago

> More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are now in use and an estimated 2 billion lines are added or changed each year, according to IBM Research. Woah there, I would have never imagined that.

maxharris 9y ago

Dijkstra said it best in 1975: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/E... And before you get angry at me, answer this simple question: have you actually ever used COBOL? I spent a year of my life translating a COBOL mess into Delphi. It was horrible - the code I was working with had no functions (unless you think of a module defined in an entire file as a function), global scope on variables, and tons of ugly COBOL boilerplate, as dictated by the language. And it's no surprise that COBOL was a historical dead-end. Unlike FORTRAN and Lisp, it begat nothing. That's why I'm hard-pressed to venerate anyone that had anything to do with perpetuating that mess.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
Being a cynic is easy. Which programming language(s) did Dijkstra promote?
- maxharris 9y ago
  Apparently it changed over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373443 https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2006/05/31/rediscovering-dr-dijkstra-and-giving-lisp-a-second-chance/ https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2006/05/31/rediscovering-dr-dij...
nn3 9y ago
>Unlike FORTRAN and Lisp, it begat nothing. Which programming language was begat by FORTRAN? The ALGOL family seems rather independent to me. Both FORTRAN and COBOL had the misfortune to be created before structured programming. Others, like FORTH and LISP were lucky that they are flexible enough to easily add new programming conventions. You could probably say that modern report generators were begat by COBOL to some degree (even though FORTRAN had formatted output too) It seems programming languages designed to be "easy to use" suffer from lots of people writing really terrible code with it. Excel or VB have similar issues.
- greglindahl 9y ago

jxub 9y ago

To like COBOL, you need to posess a particular kind of rigid corporate mindset. I wonder whether it's fathers/mothers had the mentioned physic structure, or it was a fruit of 50's salaryman mental subjugation. No offense ment.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 9y ago
Or was it a product of the computers at the time? Here's a 1959 computer, donated to a school in 1965. This was filmed in 1969. One of the children wrote a language - minigol - so the younger children didn't have to use assembler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI Just turning the machine on requires coordination between several people using intercom.
- coreyp_1 9y ago
  Thank you for the video! It was interesting to see the binary adding exercise!
brians 9y ago
Or perhaps you need to be a frustrated machine language programmer?
throwawayhf 9y ago
2030: "To like Perl, you need to possess a particular kind of BOFH mindset, a fruit of an 80s abused nerd mental subjugation." 2050: "To like Roar and Yavascript, you need to possess a particular kind of startup bro mindset, a fruit of a 10s ZIRP mental subjugation." Well, Alan Kay already said it better. "Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]..."
xxxxxxxx 9y ago

breck 9y ago

Her book "Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals" is not available as an eBook and is out of print and costs over $100 used on Amazon. Would be great if there was a cheaper way to read it.

breck 9y ago
Though it looks only useful for the listing and factual description of languages at that time: 47[12].- -JEAN E. SAMMET, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1969, xxx $ 785 pp., 24 cm. Price $18.00 ($13.50 student edition). Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals is a monumental and encyclopedic treatment of its field. The primary aim of the book, as stated by the author, is to provide, ". . . in one place, and in a consistent fashion, fundamental information on programming languages, including history, general characteristics, similarities,'and differences." This aim has without doubt been achieved, and achieved well. A second aim is"... to provide specific basic information on all the significant, and most of the minor, higher level languages developed in the United States." This aim also has been achieved; there is an impressive collection of about 120 languages described in varying amounts of detail. The book is organized into three introductory chapters, six chapters on languages grouped more or less according to application areas, and two chapters on unimplemented concepts and future long-range developments. The organization is well thought out and suits the author's purposes admirably. The first chapter is devoted to defining what is meant by a programming language, to pros and cons of higherlevel languages, to classifying and categorizing languages, and to a presentation of factors influencing the choice of a language. Omitted from consideration are most European programming languages, and certain languages that are not, by the author's definition, higher-level programming languages, e.g., Report Generator, Autocoder, APL and SLIP. The second and third chapters are devoted to describing functional and technical characteristics of programming languages, partly with the aim of developing a format for the later discussions of specific languages. Functional characteristics, roughly, are the historical, political, economic, and pragmatic aspects of a language, i.e., those that are not part of its definition. Technical characteristics have to do with the actual syntax and semantics of the language. This outline of discussion is spelled out in some detail and generally adhered to in the sequel. The fact that approximately equal amounts of space are devoted to functional and technical characteristics is an indicator of the tone of the discussion. The author does not attempt to teach the reader how to program in any of the languages discussed, and indeed, one certainly would not learn programming from this book. As a reference work for background on specific programming languages, the book is a success. As a textbook on programming languages as a field of study, it is not. The tone of the introductory chapters is too platitudinous, and the technical information, both in depth and in organization, is inadequate to the task of imparting a feeling for what programming languages are all about. The difficulty is that this feeling can ultimately be achieved only by actually writing programs in various languages and thus coming to appreciate their fine points. Thus, the uniformity of organization across languages is achieved at the cost of omitting really deep examination of a few of them. The chapter on technical characteristics attempts to raise the issues of what choices a language designer must make, but the question of how, historically, they have been made is scattered among the different language discussions and never really explored in depth. Questions such as scoping rules, extensibility, and the structuring of data aggregates are never treated in a unified way, and the material on minor languages and on functional characteristics tends to deemphasize the importance of the technical characteristics of the major languages. There are no exercises in the book, and, indeed, the material provides no basis for exercises. In summary: Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals is a fine source for factual knowledge, but a poor source for gaining understanding. PAUL ABRAHAMS

ninjakeyboard 9y ago

Black-bar worthy?

rams 9y ago

Fred Brooks on COBOL - https://cycle-gap.blogspot.in/2009/08/fred-brooks-on-cobols-success.html https://cycle-gap.blogspot.in/2009/08/fred-brooks-on-cobols-...

maxharris 9y ago

"I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language." http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

intopieces 9y ago
What is this point of this quote? I downvoted this comment because it does not contribute to the discussion. A common tactic is to post a quote, wait for people to refute the most common/charitable interpretation of the quote's meaning in the context of discussion, then to reply with "that's not what I meant" and end it satisfied. So tell us, what is the point of bringing up this quote?
- moxious 9y ago
  Poster isn't biting on this request. Somewhat ironically the quote is sourced from an article about a disfavored language arguing why cobol should be a disfavored language. Engineering is subject still to styles and fads, I guess the quote is just furthering that general mentality. COBOL isn't "cool" whatever that should mean.
ckarmann 9y ago
The purpose of species is to reproduce themselves. The purpose of programming languages is not to produce other languages but to write software. It seems Cobol served this purpose well at the time.

stesch 9y ago

DISPLAY SPACES UPON CRT.

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nthcolumn 9y ago

COBOL was a foundation language in CS101 30 years ago and it was outdated then. There were jobs in legacy COBOL. Probably still are. It sucked but not as hard as RPG II.

edtechdev 9y ago

She proposed natural language programming over 50 years ago. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365274 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365274 There still hasn't been a whole lot of progress, although there have been some research projects and some closed source applications like Inform7 and WolframAlpha.

mindcrime 9y ago
although there have been some research projects and some closed source applications like Inform7 and WolframAlpha. Just as an FYI, Inform7[1] is - according to Wikipedia anyway - available under the Artistic License[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License
- rsaarelm 9y ago
  The most interesting part that translates the natural language Inform 7 code to the more traditional Inform 6 code has not been open sourced. Graham Nelson talked about wanting to release the code as literate programs[1]. Currently the status of the publishable release for the ni compiler component is "as of April 2009, about two-thirds done"[2]. [1]: http://inform7.com/sources/inweb/ http://inform7.com/sources/inweb/ [2]: http://inform7.com/sources/webs/ http://inform7.com/sources/webs/
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    Currently the status of the publishable release for the ni compiler component is "as of April 2009, about two-thirds done" Blimey. :-( Here's hoping it sees the light of day at some point!

Pxtl 9y ago

I guess it says something sad about my prejudices that I saw the name "Jean" and assumed it was a man's name. I forgot that the field was so much more inclusive of women back then.

herpderperator 9y ago
Don't feel bad. She finds it funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv4KrY9GhQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv4KrY9GhQQ
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ams6110 9y ago
I would assume "Jean" to be a woman and "Gene" to be a man.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  I was thinking French. I kept seeing notable programmers with female-sounding names like Jan and then realizing it was a non-Anglophonic man's name that's spelled like an English woman's name.

cobol999 9y ago

Janet your contribution to Software Industry will always be remembered. I really love Cobol. We developers salute to you. RIP Sr. Vice President - IT GIIM https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/general-management/ngiimic-chandresh-jain/ https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/gene... www.sc-digital-engineering.com

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cobol9999 9y ago

Jean Sammet- Your contribution to Software Industry will always be remembered. I really love Cobol. We developers salute to you. RIP Sr. Vice President - IT https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/general-management/ngiimic-chandresh-jain/ https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-certificates/gene... www.sc-digital-engineering.com

cobol9999 9y ago