https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/history/ Recent content in History on Hillel Wayne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/indiana-pi-bill/ Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/indiana-pi-bill/ I originally ran this on my newsletter last year but I like it way too much to let it rot in the archives. Enjoy! Happy Pi Day!1 To celebrate I want to get away from software for a bit and talk about something special. You may have heard the story that the Indiana legislature tried to change the value of π, to something like 3 or 4 or 3.15 or something like that. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/ Sun, 28 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/ A couple years back I gave a talk on researching software history, using “linked list interview questions” as an example topic. Since referring people to a video is less accessible than just writing a blog post, I’ve reproduced the question here. So why do interviewers like to ask linked list questions? If you ask people, you usually get one of two answers: “It tests CS fundamentals.” “It tests reasoning through a new problem. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/always-more-history/ Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/always-more-history/ Last month I researched two historical questions. I originally posted summaries on Twitter and am reproducing both here.1 Why Vim Uses hjkl Question: Why does Vim use hjkl and not the arrow keys for navigation? Common Explanation: It keeps your fingers on the home row. Historical Explanation: Bill Joy developed vi on the ADM-3A, which didn’t have dedicated arrow keys. If you look at the ADM keyboard, it put the arrow keys on the hjkl keys. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/ Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/ The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what “significant in history” means. So let’s talk about some “mostly dead” languages and why they matter so much. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alan-kay/ Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/alan-kay/ People keep claiming that modern OOP languages aren’t “really OOP” because they don’t follow Alan Kay’s definition of “OOP”. I can see the logic here, even if I disagree the conclusion. More recently I’ve seen people start claiming that Kay invented objects entirely. This is factually incorrect. Alan Kay did not invent objects. They come from Simula, which the Smalltalk-72 manual cites as a major inspiration (pg 117). The famous 1981 Byte magazine issue that popularized Smalltalk and OOP explicitly says “the fundamental idea of objects, messages, and classes came from SIMULA. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/why-dont-people-use-formal-methods/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/why-dont-people-use-formal-methods/ I saw this question on the Software Engineering Stack Exchange: What are the barriers that prevent widespread adoption of formal methods? The question was closed as opinion-based, and most of the answers were things like “its too expensive!!!” or “website isn’t airplane!!!” These are sorta kinda true but don’t explain very much. I wrote this to provide a larger historical picture of formal methods, why they’re actually so unused, and what we’re doing to make them used. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/equals-as-assignment/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/equals-as-assignment/ Take the following code: a = 1 a = a + 1 print(a) A common FP critique of imperative programming goes like this: “How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2. Mutable assignment makes no sense.” This is a notation mismatch: “equals” should mean “equality”, when it really means “assign”. I agree with this criticism and think it’s bad notation. But I also know some languages don’t write a = a + 1, instead writing a := a + 1. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/thinking-the-unthinkable/ Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/thinking-the-unthinkable/ I recently read Tomas Petricek’s Thinking the Unthinkable, where he argues that modern PLT makes several restrictive assumptions about the nature of programming. Our reliance on mathematics in CS is not fundamental and our obsession with formal logic and algorithms keeps us from seeing other possible paradigms. He proposes two other unthinkable paradigms that are unrelatable to modern mathematical programming. I disagree with his premises: I think there’s a very valid reason to ground aspects of programming in mathematics. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/important-women-in-cs/ Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/important-women-in-cs/ I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace. Can’t we think of someone else for once? I went ahead and compiled a bunch of really important women according to some fairly arbitrary rules: There’s a specific thing you can point to and say “That. That’s their contribution.” This leaves out a lot of really qualified people who made lots of general contributions, but I wanted to keep this list fixed on soundbites.