3 ms·

Since it was on his Bell Labs website, surely this phrasing of the feeling came no earlier than the late 80s, rather than when he left academia in '68? ("Functi

Since it was on his Bell Labs website, surely this phrasing of the feeling came no earlier than the late 80s, rather than when he left academia in '68? ("Functional programming" as a contrasting term seems to have barely existed before Backus's Turing Award lecture in '77.) For the 80s and much of the 90s Ritchie's view seems obviously dominant, in no small part due to his own work in making extremely "usable" tools for procedural programming.

082349872349872 6y ago
Reading CACM on 50-year delay gives me an interesting diff against current state of the art. Functional programming was a thing (albeit perhaps before "functional programming" was a name) in the sixties. CPL, IIRC, actually had an outer-functional semantics, and one would escape to "value of" blocks to do procedural stuff (which was necessary in inner code due to the pitifully small machines of the day). Writing bootstrap compilers in GPM must've been very similar to working in a lazy functional language. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL_(programming_language)