John Nagle (Animats) has commented a few times about how, contrary to the "high culture" story of the evolution of computers (Turing, von Neumann etc), the gradual evolution of "calculators" was itself leading up to computers
That's a great point, and I've been thinking about the similar issue with compilers and type systems. Nowadays people seem to frame type systems as originating from math and logic, but really the first type systems were for instruction selection -- generating different code for a+b when they're ints or floats. It was more of an engineering thing.
So many rules in C support that, and most of them survive in C++ (arrays decay to pointers, etc.)
The last 40 years have seen an impressive confluence of theory and practice in programming language design, with the interesting side-effect of taking the sense of “types” originating in symbolic logic and implanting it into engineering traditions.
I kinda want to read about type systems from a historically accurate perspective. I think it's well known that Ritchie and Thompson didn't agree with many of the type safety improvements in ANSI C (even though ANSI C seems ridiculously weak from a modern perspective).
Somewhat related to this is that there seems to be a ton of exposition on Hindley Milner type systems, but very little on explicit object oriented type systems (Java, C#, C++, Kotlin, Swift, etc.)
That's a great point, and I've been thinking about the similar issue with compilers and type systems. Nowadays people seem to frame type systems as originating from math and logic, but really the first type systems were for instruction selection -- generating different code for a+b when they're ints or floats. It was more of an engineering thing.
So many rules in C support that, and most of them survive in C++ (arrays decay to pointers, etc.)
In Search of Types is a great read: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/stephen-kell/in-s...
The last 40 years have seen an impressive confluence of theory and practice in programming language design, with the interesting side-effect of taking the sense of “types” originating in symbolic logic and implanting it into engineering traditions.
I kinda want to read about type systems from a historically accurate perspective. I think it's well known that Ritchie and Thompson didn't agree with many of the type safety improvements in ANSI C (even though ANSI C seems ridiculously weak from a modern perspective).
Somewhat related to this is that there seems to be a ton of exposition on Hindley Milner type systems, but very little on explicit object oriented type systems (Java, C#, C++, Kotlin, Swift, etc.)