language

I found this next video on a great Hacker News thread, “What is your favourite tech talk?”

Oh shit! this is incredible - IBM engineer walks through the development of a FORTRAN program, including I’m guessing, the first appearance of a GOTO statement! Then, in part two, they have their FORmula TRANslator translate a Fortran program into IBM symbolic language/assembly, and output it to PUNCH CARDS!!. wow..

I thought I had seen this, but no, it’s just a similar theme to other talks by Rob Pike I’ve seen - this one is quite fun to code along too, its a super neat and compact concurrency app..

Now approaching it’s 50th birthday, nice wee video about the origins of BASIC and Time Sharing..

Fabulous piece and video chat with George Dyson over at the always reliable Edge -

A Universe Of Self-replicating Code | Conversation | Edge.

I finished reading James Gleick's The Information tonite - so good!

Really, the central character is Claude Shannon, who I'm ashamed to admit I didn't previously know much about. Had a quick search when i finished it and found this decent little 30 min documentary which gives a good overview -