The preparation of programs for an electronic digital computer
by M. V. Wilkes · first published 1951
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His group with the EDSAC did some absolutely tremendous and groundbreaking work. Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill wrote a book, "Preparation of programs for an electronic digital computer", that pretty much describes the core software engineering precepts we use today - in 1951. Gill wrote "The Diagnosis of Mistakes in Programmes on the EDSAC", which gives a good snip of what they were…
on “Some things I've learnt about programming” ↗You might be interested in reading The preparation of programs for an electronic digital computer (1951) By Maurice V. WIlkes, David J. Wheeler and Stanley Gill. That's the textbook they used for the first programming course (in Europe) using the EDSAC. The interesting thing to me about this book…
on “Rediscovered EDSAC diagrams reveal secrets of first computers” ↗…(so far) volumes of TAOCP, and he even uses a special notation νx for the sum of the bits of x. It has always been of interest (from later in the same volume): > The first textbook on programming, The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer by Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill, second edition (Reading, Mass.: Addison–Wesley, 1957), 155, 191–193, presented an interesting subroutine for sideways addition due to D. B. Gillies and J. C. P. Miller.
on “You Won’t Believe This One Weird CPU Instruction (2019)” ↗Going on a tangent, as I understand it, the first programming book was "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer: With special reference to the EDSAC and the Use of a Library of Subroutines", by Maurice Wilkes, David Wheller and Stanley Gill (1951). https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk
on “Implementing Cosine in C from Scratch (2020)” ↗…global variables and goto statements and no subroutines, but that wasn't because subroutines hadn't been invented yet, or even publicized; wilkes explained how to use subroutines in his 01951 book "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer" https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk but they were presumably invented somewhat earlier, possibly by david wheeler the whole array construct in postgres seems like it was probably a huge…
on “Why Are There No Relational DBMSs? [pdf]” ↗This article is about one woman's experiences with EDSAC. There's some more information about EDSAC here: http://ledr.luon.net/documents/2R930/edsac/the-edsac.pdf The WWG is more formally known as The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer. (I think.) Here's an Archive link: https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk
on “Programming in the early days of the computer age” ↗I took a look in the EDSAC manual ("The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer", 1951) at https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk/page/154/... - linking to the earliest popcount description, Gillies-Miller. I didn't see anything. Then again, that hardware doesn't seem…
on “Ask HN: History of XOR Swapping” ↗…Algorithms includes a history and bibliography on pages 225-226. Knuth mentions Babbage as envisioning the idea and Hopper as the first implementer. The implementation in Wheeler and Gill's textbook, The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, is noted for its influence.
on “David Wheeler (British computer scientist)” ↗