Aug 1
Source: oddsontechnology on Instagram
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Source: oddsontechnology on Instagram
In the 1950s the PvdA (party for labour, Dutch social democrat party), was activity involved in sending soldiers to Indonesia because they still considered it a Dutch colony. Not every PvdA member agreed with this, and they formed, together with non-stalanist CPN (Communist Party of the Netherlands) members, a new party: the PSP (Pacifist Socialist Party).
From 1975 till 1981 the head of the PSP was Lambert Meertens, where he met Guido van Rossum, who was working on automating the membership registration. So now in 1982 Meertens is working on ABC, and he consults van Rossum about it. van Rossum works on ABC for a while, and he takes a lot of inspiration from it when developing Python.
The PSP doesn't exist anymore (it, together with the CPN, and two other parties formed GroenLinks (GreenLeft) which is now basically fusing with the PvdA), but without it Python might not have existed, so even though the PSP never got many seats; in a way it still had a very big impact on the world.
Idk what the moral of the story is; "Form a good political party because even if you don't achieve much politically, the party might play a small role in the development of a popular programming language" ? That doesn't seem like a real widely applicable moral, but idk, I thought it was a nice story
The story of BASIC’s development began in 1963, when Kemeny and Kurtz, both mathematics professors at Dartmouth, recognized the need for a programming language that could be used by non-technical students. At the time, most programming languages were complex and required a strong background in mathematics and computer science. Kemeny and Kurtz wanted to create a language that would allow students from all disciplines to use computers, regardless of their technical expertise.
The development of BASIC was a collaborative effort between Kemeny, Kurtz, and a team of students, including Mary Kenneth Keller, John McGeachie, and others. The team worked tirelessly to design a language that was easy to learn and use, with a syntax that was simple and intuitive. They drew inspiration from existing programming languages, such as ALGOL and FORTRAN, but also introduced many innovative features that would become hallmarks of the BASIC language.
One of the key innovations of BASIC was its use of simple, English-like commands. Unlike other programming languages, which required users to learn complex syntax and notation, BASIC used commands such as “PRINT” and “INPUT” that were easy to understand and remember. This made it possible for non-technical users to write programs and interact with the computer, without needing to have a deep understanding of computer science.
BASIC was first implemented on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, a pioneering computer system that allowed multiple users to interact with the computer simultaneously. The Time-Sharing System was a major innovation in itself, as it allowed users to share the computer’s resources and work on their own projects independently. With BASIC, users could write programs, run simulations, and analyze data, all from the comfort of their own terminals.
The impact of BASIC was immediate and profound. The language quickly gained popularity, not just at Dartmouth, but also at other universities and institutions around the world. It became the language of choice for many introductory programming courses, and its simplicity and ease of use made it an ideal language for beginners. As the personal computer revolution took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, BASIC became the language of choice for many hobbyists and enthusiasts, who used it to write games, utilities, and other applications.
Today, BASIC remains a popular language, with many variants and implementations available. While it may not be as widely used as it once was, its influence can still be seen in many modern programming languages, including Visual Basic, Python, and JavaScript. The development of BASIC was a major milestone in the history of computer science, as it democratized computing and made it accessible to a wider range of people.
The Birth of BASIC (Dartmouth College, August 2014)
Friday, April 25, 2025
Doomsday 2000 (Magazine article, Peter de Jager, 1993)
THE article about the Y2K bug. Read it here, and read a multi-person retrospective mentioning it here.
ComProg History YOU SHOULD KNOW!!!
1843 Ada Lovelace is credited as being the first person to describe or write a computer program.
In 1843, she described an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine.
1889 The Hollerith tabulating machine was invented by Herman Hollerith in 1889, allowing for data to be programmatically counted and tabulated.
1956 One of the first programming languages, FORTRAN, was introduced to the public on October 15, 1956. It was developed by John Backus and others at IBM.
1958 The second-oldest programming language, LISP was developed by John McCarthy and was first used in 1958.
1959 COBOL started being developed in 1959 by Grace Hopper and Bob Bemer.
1964 The original BASIC programming language was developed by John Kemeny, Mary Keller, and Thomas Kurtz, and was introduced to the public on May 1, 1964.
1965 Simula is considered the first ever object-oriented programming language, developed around 1965 by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard.
1966 Martin Richards developed the BCPL programming language in 1966, which became popular due to its portability.
1966 The MUMPS programming language was developed by Neil Pappalardo at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1966.
1967 Known for its graphics capabilities, Logo was created by Seymour Paper in 1967.
1971 Pascal was developed in 1971 by Niklaus Wirth.
1972 Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan developed the C programming language at Bell Labs in 1972.
1972 The Prolog programming language was developed by Alain Colmerauer and colleagues in 1972 at the University of Marseilles.
1972 Smalltalk was the second ever object-oriented programming language and the first true IDE, developed by Alan Kay and others at Xerox PARC in 1972.
1974 SQL is a database programming language and was developed by Edgar Codd in 1974 and is still important in the programming language world.
1975 A variation of LISP, the Scheme programming language was created in 1975 by Guy Steele and Gerry Sussman at MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab.
1975 The Altair BASIC programming language was developed by Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff, and was made available for use on January 2, 1975. It was used to create programs for Altair computers.
1979 Development of the C++ programming language was started in 1979 by Bjarne Stroustrup. Originally called "C with classes," C++ is one of the most widelyused programming languages.
1979 Oracle released the first commercial version of SQL in 1979.
1979 The Department of Defense developed the Ada programming language, originally named DoD-1, and named it after Ada Lovelace in May 1979.
1984 FoxPro is a programming language for developing database applications and was released by Fox Software in 1984.
1984 Cleve Moler started developing the MATLAB programming language in the late 1970s, and it was released to the public, with the MATLAB software package, in 1984.
1987 The open source programming language Perl that was developed by Larry Wall was introduced in 1987. It is commonly used in creating CGI scripts and programming web applications.
1988 Developed in the mid-1980s by Brad Cox and Tom Love, the Objective-C programming language was officially licensed by NeXT in 1988.
1990 Tim Berners-Lee developed the HTML markup language in 1990. HTML is one of the most popular and widely-used programming languages in the world.
1990 Haskell, a general-purpose programming language, was introduced in 1990.
1990 Engineers at Apple developed the Dylan programming language in the early 1990s. Dylan was designed to resemble the syntax of the ALGOL programming language.
1991 Development of Python was started in 1989 by Guido van Rossum and released to the public in 1991.
1991 Visual Basic was developed by Alan Cooper and released in May 1991.
1993 Lua was created in 1993 by engineers at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
1993 R is a programming language created by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka and introduced in 1993.
1994 The concept of CSS was started by Håkon Wium Lie in 1994. W3C introduced the specification for CSS in 1996.
1995 Java was developed by James Gosling and other developers at Sun Microsystems, and was first introduced to the public in 1995.
1995 The object-oriented programming language Ruby developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto was first released in 1995.
1995 The experimental, multi-paradigm Curry programming language was introduced by Michael Hanus, Herbert Kuchen, and Juan Jose Moreno-Navarro in 1995.
1995 Racket is a general purpose programming language developed by Matthias Felleisen in 1995.
1995 A server-side interpreted scripting language, PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf starting in 1994 and released on June 8, 1995.
1995 Originally named LiveScript when released in November 1995, JavaScript was developed by Brendan Eich and renamed as such in December 1995.
1996 Introduced in 1996, OCaml is an object-oriented version of the Caml programming language.
1998 XML is a markup language, with the specification for XML being developed by W3C and recommended on February 10, 1998.
1999 Development of the D programming language started in December 1999. D is a higher level language compared to C++.
2000 Based on C++ and Java, the C# programming language was developed by Microsoft and introduced in June 2000. C# became an ISO standard in 2003.
2003 The object-oriented programming language Scala was introduced in 2003.
2005 Don Syme developed the F# programming language and Microsoft first introduced it in 2005.
2007 The Go programming language was developed at Google starting in 2007. It was completed and introduced to the public in 2009.
2007 Rich Hickey developed the Clojure programming language and released the first version in 2007.
2008 Introduced in 2008, Nim is a programming language used to develop software requiring strict limits on how system memory is used.
2008 The object-oriented programming language Reia was introduced in 2008.
2010 The multi-paradigm CoffeeScript programming language, capable of being compiled into JavaScript, was officially released in 2010.
2011 Google developed the open source web-based Dart programming language, introducing it to the public in October 2011.
2012 Julia was developed by Jeff Bezanson, Alan Edelman, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah and released in 2012. It is a high-level programming language used for scientific computing.
2014 Babel is a general-purpose programming language developed in 2014 and used to create programs for conserving battery life and system resources on devices.
2014 Created by Apple and released on June 2, 2014, the Swift programming language helps create programs and apps for iOS, macOS, the Apple Watch, and AppleTV.
2015 Graydon Hoare started development of the Rust programming language around 2010. After contributions from hundreds of people, it was officially released as version 1.0.0 alpha by Mozilla research on January 9, 2015.
history of programming languages
programming languages evolved to make computers more accessible and powerful,,
early computers were programmed in machine code and assembly, which were tedious and very prone to errors
quick timeline :
1940/50s : machine code and assembly language, directly manipulate hardware
1950s : FORTRAN (scientific computing), COBOL (business computing)
1960/70s : BASIC (teaching), C (systems programming)
1980s : object-oriented languages like C++ and Smalltalk
1990s–2000s: Java (cross-platform), Python (easy-to-read scripting), JavaScript (web)
2010s+ : modern languages like Rust, Go, Kotlin, Swift, focusing on safety, concurrency, and efficiency
Seeking to honor Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Keeping with a simple palette of French Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna, and white.
Realizing after the fact that I should have painted the background first, but was a bit eager to try to capture her likeness.
Seeking to honor Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Keeping with a simple palette of French Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna, and white.
Realizing after the fact that I should have painted the background first, but was a bit eager to try to capture her likeness.