Customer Reviews

Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals (Automatic Computation)

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The book covers about 120 programming languages with examples from about 30 of them. There are over 800 bibliographic entries, covering history and development, and an extensive author cross-reference. -- information from dust jacket flaps.

Sections: General introduction -- Functional characteristics of programming languages -- Technical characteristics of programming languages -- Languages for numerical scientific problems -- Languages for business data processing problems -- String and list processing languages -- Formal algebraic manipulation languages -- Multipurpose languages -- Specialized languages -- Significant unimplemented concepts -- Future long-range developments.

In 1969, Jean Sammet was a programming language technology manager for the Federal Systems Division of IBM Corporation. She was active in helping start the Annals of the History of Computing in the late 1970s and among the first group of ACM Fellows elected in 1994. For someone looking at the early history of computer software across a distance of over 40 years, this is a Rosetta stone.

Darwinism is about the survival of the fittest. With that in mind, this book on programming languages from the 50's to the late 60's is a great way to understand a bit better what came before C, C++, java, C#, ML, etc.

Each chapter covers a language or a familly of languages. It is a bit "reference" like but that does not take out the fun of the reading. I have owned this book for a long time and I still find pleasure in taking it out for bedtime read.