[TUHS] Book Recommendation [ reallly inscrutable languages ]

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Fri Nov 19 08:59:10 AEST 2021


The discussions under this subject line have somewhat strayed from
Unix heritage issues, but because several people have contributed
views of assorted programming languages that mostly grew up on
Unix-family systems, I decided to add this memory.

Several years ago, I attended a talk by Dan McCracken (1930--2011),
noted book author in computer areas, and VP and later President of the
ACM (1978--1980).  His talk was about programming languages, and was
done in a question/answer format, with Dan offering both parts.

He began:

   Q: In 10 years, which of the following programming languages will
      still be in use:  Basic, Cobol, Fortran, PL/I, ....

   A: First of all, Basic is not a programming language.  Then ...

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