History Of Programming Languages Two

History of Programming Languages, Volume 2 by Thomas J. Bergin, Richard G. Gibson, Richard G., Jr Gibson, Addison-Wesley, 1995

ISBN 0-20189-502-1 Proceedings of the HOPL2 conference in 1992. Includes sections on Smalltalk, Lisp and other inferior languages.

Abstracts for most of the papers (and PDF files of the papers themselves, if you have an ACM digital library subscription) are available at http://www.acm.org/pubs/contents/proceedings/plan/154766/

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I only bought it because of Wiki, to improve my own InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas and to counteract the tendency towards SoftwareAgeism. Thanks for pointing to AlanKay's wonderful EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk here, whoever it was.

Plus there's FredBrooks' key-note. The guy has the cheek to use two of my favorite NewAnalogiesForSoftware in talking, as a self-confessed outsider, of the whys and wherefores of language design: JrrTolkien and JohannSebastianBach. LanceWalton has much the same take as FredBrooks on Bach's humility being key to his greatness as a 'designer', a viewpoint that really inspired me back in 1999. (Since then I got proud and failed again.) -- RichardDrake

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The material on ChuckMoore and ForthLanguage is wonderful too. Interesting how his approach resonates with XP. The history of Algol is a fun read also. Great book. -- MichaelFeathers

The Forth material (from the HOPL II conference) is also available on the Forth, Inc. website: http://www.forth.com/Content/History/History1.htm (some quotes are copied in ForthValues).

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My favourite excerpt:

C is quirky, flawed and an enormous success -- DennisRitchie

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