It's (Not) All Been Done

[Peter Gibbons]

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/guest-ed-200609.htm

Every new frontier is the exhilarating domain of inventors and explorers. Life on the frontier can be primitive and even dangerous, but in return the pioneers have an overwhelming compensation: There’s so much room, so much uncharted territory, and everything is just waiting to be discovered and invented.

The 1950s and 1960s were like that. Computer science was new, and you know the pioneers—names like Edsger Dijkstra and Sir Tony Hoare. But have you ever felt that all the cool stuff was already done back in the 1950s and 1960s, back when electronic computers were new? Consider that all of the major “new” technologies of the past 15 years were originally invented in those early days: Garbage collection? Java didn’t invent it; McCarthy invented it for Lisp in 1958, and published his paper in 1960. Object oriented programming? Smalltalk and C++ didn’t invent it; Simula did, vintage 1965, and released in 1967. Parameterized generic types? Ada and C++ didn’t invent those; Strachey did, also in 1967. Incidentally, 1967 was a banner year; it also saw the first design meetings for the ARPANET.

But bringing those technologies to mainstream programmers required developing them further, including doing new research and development to make the technologies more broadly usable (e.g., think Mosaic), and making them into widely usable polished products. Languages like Smalltalk, C++, Java, C#, Python, and many others, and all the smart people who developed them and worked on their many implementations, deserve huge credit for making that huge engineering leap.

So, yes, it surely is humbling to realize that all the hot stuff that seems so brand new today actually existed back when our parents still had to carry their stacks of punched cards to school in snow up to their armpits and uphill both ways. (And that assumes our parents were one of the lucky few to have shared access to a mainframe computer that was far less powerful than your PDA.) But Java brought garbage collection to the mainstream, Smalltalk did the same for objects, C++ did the same for generic types—and next we’re going to do the same for concurrency and parallel programming.

[I D Shukhov]

So, yes, it surely is humbling to realize that all the hot stuff that seems so brand new today actually existed back when our parents still had to carry their stacks of punched cards to school in snow up to their armpits and uphill both ways.

I never had to carry them through snow, but I've carried my share of punched card decks.   

My first FTE programming job was in 1978 at the Naval Ship Research and Development Center at Carderock Md., next to the currently amazingly swollen Potomac River.  I'm going to look at it tomorrow from a scenic site, but I digress...

I knew pretty soon that I hated programming and started taking accounting courses.   My older brother, who had done well for himself in business, emphatically advised me not to do it.   He said they were a bunch of "bean counters".   

So I took a computer science course and discovered that there were some pretty cool data structures and maybe it wasn't so bad after all if you really knew something about programming.  My boss was a physicist and, while clever, knew nothing about formal computer science.

And maybe it had a bright future, too, if I could just find the right job.