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A Programmers Place
Personal blog · vanemden.wordpress.comprogramminghistory
A Programmers Place is a personal blog at vanemden.wordpress.com about programming and history. Since 2010, 60 different Hacker News readers have linked it 83 times, most often “How Recursion Got into Programming (2014)”. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (29) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Maarten van Emden's blog covers the history of Prolog and logic programming, how recursion entered ALGOL 60, Dijkstra, and 'ventilated prose' (one sentence per line). Commenters cite it as a source.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called 'well-written', 'fascinating' and 'interesting'; one says it hits 'the precisely correct distinguishing note'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 29 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Observations, Reviews, and Essays
Most-linked posts?
- How Recursion Got into Programming (2014)17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2015-08-27
- Ventilated Prose (2009)5 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-07-19
- Who Killed Prolog? (2010)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-05-30
- Who killed Prolog?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-08-31
- I remember Edsger Dijkstra3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-01-08
- Flowcharts, the once and future programming language3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-04-10
- The Fatal Choice (Who killed Prolog - part 2)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-09-01
- “AI”: What’s in a Name?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-03
- Writing hack: Ventilated Prose « A Programmers Place2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-02-17
- What MIT hackers were up to (1958 - 1985)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-24
What Hacker News says?
It turns out that there is a lot of discourse out there about "semantic newlines", under a few different names. So far the names I've seen are: - One Sentence Per Line (OSPL) - Semantic Line Breaks (SemBr) - Semantic Linefeeds - Ventilated Prose - Semantic newlines Reading through the pages below was helpful in getting a better idea of what language people use to discuss this. They're mostly historical retrospective…
Comment linking /2009/01/01/ventilated-prose
on “Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax”Submitted How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors as a story · 187 points
HN discussionI'm surprised no one has mentioned ventilated prose, which is like this but even moreso: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/
Comment linking /2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/
on “Writing one sentence per line”Submitted Is Software Engineering Possible? as a story · 157 points
HN discussionPeter Naur was editor of the Algol 60 report, and with foresight, cunning, and a bit of trickery, he is responsible for getting recursion into a mainstream programming language. https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-...
Comment linking /2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/
on “Peter Naur has died”Submitted How Recursion Got into Programming (2014) as a story · 127 points
HN discussionAlso Naur did have a good deal of the responsibility for getting support for recursion into Algol 60: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-... Just think how the programming language landscape might look today if recursion had never gotten into mainstream languages, or maybe only had begun to become the norm recently.
Comment linking /2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/
on “Peter Naur has died”Submitted A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic as a story · 127 points
HN discussionGetting recursive functions into ALGOL turns out to have been a controversial move that made for a fun story: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-...
Comment linking /2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/
on “Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps”Submitted IA or AI? as a story · 103 points
HN discussionThere is an interesting write-up about Algol 60's recursion [0] that was discussed here before [1]. [0] https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131664
Comment linking /2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/
on “Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders”Submitted How recursion got into Algol 60: a comedy of errors as a story · 103 points
HN discussionThere are vast archives of his writing here: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ A paper describing THE: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~zaher/classes/CS656/p341-dijkstr... This paper here http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/DijkstrasCrisis_Leide... has a worthwhile quote: Dijkstra’s crisis was rather more idiosyncratic than has generally been acknowledged. He took up the language of crisis to convey the need to repl…
Comment linking /2008/05/06/i-remember-edsger-dijkstra-1930-2002/
on “Dijkstra: “You will be treated as grown-ups””Submitted Who killed Prolog? as a story · 93 points
HN discussionCPUs had registers back when C was invented too :) The reason C doesn't expose registers is because the flat memory model is more universal and more uniform between CPUs than the registers, which often have a lot of special-case behavior, especially on non-RISC CPUs: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2016/03/15/why-does-c-not-hav... . Besides, C has a "register" keyword, although it's probably ignored by almost all com…
Comment linking /2016/03/15/why-does-c-not-have-an-exponentiation-operator-2/
on “The cost of forsaking C”Submitted Who Killed Prolog? (2010) as a story · 82 points
HN discussion> So no function calls? No recursive ones. If you forbid (direct or indirect) recursion, then a function's local variables can all be static rather than stack-allocated. Similarly, each function could have a hidden, static "return address" variable (since all parameters are static, it's really just a hidden parameter) that is set behind the scenes when a procedure is invoked and jumped to when it exits. edit: I was…
Comment linking /2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/
on “It’s COBOL all the way down”Submitted Who Killed Prolog? as a story · 51 points
HN discussionThank you for clarifying that. What you're asking is something that the logic programming community has asked itself very often, but it's very hard to answer with any certainty. One thing that should be noted is that Prolog was very popular, for a brief period of time, in the 1980's. For instance, check out this year's TIOBE index report: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ If you scroll down to the section titled "V…
Comment linking /2010/08/21/who-killed-prolog/
on “Ask HN: Why isn't Prolog more popular?”Submitted What is Computer Science? as a story · 34 points
HN discussionSome previous blog posts on this topic, from a few years ago: "Who Killed Prolog?" by Maarten van Emden. https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/who-killed-prolog/ Posits that the huge hype put into it by the Japanese Fifth Generation Computing Project, which it failed to live up to, essentially killed off interest in the language, which it never recovered from. "Why did Prolog lose steam?", a sort-of reply I wrot…
Comment linking /2010/08/21/who-killed-prolog/
on “Ask HN: Why isn't Prolog more popular?”Submitted Recursion got into programming: intrigue, betrayal, and advanced semantics as a story · 32 points
HN discussionHow Recursion Got into Programming (2014) https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-...
Comment linking /2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/
on “How Recursion Got into Programming (2014)”Submitted Ventilated Prose (2009) as a story · 23 points
HN discussionsome related and well-reasoned, well-written essays: http://monasandnomos.org/2012/12/05/the-idea-of-a-characteri... http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/flowcharts-the-once...
Comment linking /2012/04/08/flowcharts-the-once-and-future-programming-language/
on “Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics”Submitted Interview with Alan Robinson, Inventor of Resolution Logic (2009) as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI got into Prolog last year, I really love it. I came across the fascinating article "Who Killed Prolog?" (2010), from Maarten van Emden's blog A Programmer's Place . "Compared to these three [Fortran, Lisp, Smalltalk], Prolog has fallen far behind. This was not the case in the early 1980’s, when Prolog had caught up with Lisp in capturing mindshare of what you could call non-IBM computing (to avoid the vexed term “…
Comment linking /2010/08/21/who-killed-prolog/
on “Interpreter for a simple Lisp, Written in Prolog”Submitted I remember Edsger Dijkstra as a story · 13 points
HN discussionhttp://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ 'Ventilated Prose' was a term used by Buckminster Fuller. The blog author linked above is drafting rapidly, then adding line breaks after each sentence/clause as an editing aid. He mentions Vi and the use of dif http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2008-Mar... Found in the comments to the blog post linked above. Just parking these for the inev…
Comment linking /2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/
on “One sentence per line, please”Submitted Ventilated Prose (2009) as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
