[vox] History of Linux

[Brian E. Lavender]

I am sure those guys were laughing and entertaining themselves as they
wrote "Eunuch"s. It is an interesting story and often a celebrated one. 

Yet, the true revolution came when peanut butter met chocolate and
computer scientists convened with linguists and adopted grammar theory
to write programming languages. Did you know that one of the early
Fortran compilers took 18 man years to write according to the "Dragon"
compiler book?  Yet, an upper division computer science major can write
a compiler in a semester or so? And, so came the Pascal programming
language written by Nikolaus Wirth.

Most computer science classes 30 years ago introduced programming using
Pascal. It's a great language for writing code and in many ways just
makes more scents! It influenced Ada and Eiffel. Come to think of it,
the "Make with Ada" competition is going now!

Wooo Hoo!

brian


On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 09:36:35PM -0700, Bob Scofield wrote:
> I found this article today on the history of Unix.  I found it interesting
> because I didn't know this stuff.
> 
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/
> 
> One thing I thought interesting is that the spirit of free and open software
> and collaboration among people that I associate with Linux goes back to the
> origins of Unix.
> 
> ob
> 
> _______________________________________________
> vox mailing list
> vox at lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox

-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture