HACKER Q&A
📣 occamschainsaw

Books on the history of programming languages/paradigms


Reading the comments in the recent ChatGPT threads, I am fascinated by the development of abstractions in programming languages. Are there any history of programming/CS books that address this?

  👤 abudabi123 Accepted Answer ✓
There are (history of programming languages) HOPL articles in the ACM's digital library. The series on Lisp and Fortran is interesting. Perhaps, A.I. can re-evaluate those paths prematurely not taken in the abstractions.

Here is one on the "Evolution of Emacs Lisp". [1]

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386324

👤 johndoe0815
The proceedings of the History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference could be interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languag...
👤 brudgers
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence, case studies in Common Lisp came to mind...perhaps because I was reading between the lines (or perhaps because I was misreading 'artificial intelligence' into the space between the lines).