In this case the author's background is "PhD in Mathematics at Dartmouth College, Master of Arts in Teaching Mathematics at Smith College, and BA in Anthropolog

In this case the author's background is "PhD in Mathematics at Dartmouth College, Master of Arts in Teaching Mathematics at Smith College, and BA in Anthropology at Bard College." With that background I wouldn't expect expectise in programming or programming language history. It seems like the latter is actually sort of an actual academic field, albeit a bit small. https://www.amazon.com/History-Programming-Languages-Thomas-Bergin/dp/0201895021 https://www.amazon.com/History-Programming-Languages-Thomas-... (including a chapter on CLU/Barbara Liskov) is a fantastic collection of papers from the "ACM/SIGPLAN Second History of Programming Languages Conference".). It was my first purchase from Mr Bezos' UK online book store some time in 1999 or so; I think. This is her paper from that book: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1057826 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1057826