Selected Papers on Computer Languages
by Donald Knuth · first published 2002
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I just picked up Knuth's Selected Papers on Computer Languages[1] which has some fun exploration of this topic. Mostly, I will confess, much denser than I am probably prepared for. The initial essay on languages before the 1950s was remarkably interesting. In…
on “The design side of programming language design” ↗…available online (e.g. at http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/stanford/cs_techRepor...) (TeX didn't exist yet), but a nicely typeset (and slightly updated) version occupies pages 1 to 93 of Knuth's Selected Papers on Computer Languages (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers). The many programming languages/systems described in that article go by various names like "automatic coding" and whatnot. For example, Burks in 1950 used…
on “The first use of the term “programming language”?” ↗…nice talk (~80 minutes followed by ~30 minutes of Q&A) that Donald Knuth gave on 2003-December-03 at the Computer History Museum. This paper was reprinted with corrections/updates as pages 1 to 93 of "Selected Papers on Computer Languages" (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers), and the talk was given shortly after this book came out, so he spoke about the first chapter of the book. The clever idea here is to illustrate (very)…
on “The Early Development of Programming Languages (1976) [pdf]” ↗His book "Selected Papers on Computer Languages" collects a few more papers that provide more context for the discover and subsequent application of the invention of attribute grammars.
on “The Genesis of Attribute Grammars by Donald Knuth” ↗…report in August 1976 (available online e.g. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA032123), then "for real" as a contribution to a 1977 encyclopedia, and the definitive version collected as Chapter 1 of his "Selected Papers on Computer Languages". When that collection came out in 2003, he gave a talk at the Computer History Museum, under the title "A Dozen Precursors of Fortran", available here: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262213...…
on “Early History of Programming Languages with Donald Knuth [video]” ↗