A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
By Adrian Kosmaczewski, June 2nd, 2025
Welcome to the 81st issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Compilers. In this edition, we worry about the perils of vibe coding in the minds of new generations of software developers; in the Library section, we review "Geek Sublime" by Vikram Chandra; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch a 1986 interview of Grace Hopper at "Late Night with David Letterman".
"Compiler Explorer" is the name of a fascinating project by Matt Godbolt, a British C++ software developer living in Chicago. It is the simplest and most wonderful thing; just paste a snippet of code on the left pane (in C, C++, D, C#, Java, Python, and a myriad more languages), and you will see on the right its equivalent in assembly code, as produced by one of a long list of compilers, including some commercial ones, for a wide variety of CPU architectures and software versions.
Among the many documents available at the Computer History Museum website there is an interesting artifact: a commercial brochure published in 1957 by the Remington Rand UNIVAC, "a division of Sperry Rand Corporation", titled "introducing a new language for automatic programming". In it, we learn about the advantages of the new (at the time) FLOW-MATIC programming language, the brainchild of United States Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper.
There are a lot of different things we could have talked about in the Library section of an edition dedicated to compilers; one obvious choice would have been to talk about the quintessential compiler theory book, the 1986 "Dragon Book" also known as "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman. As excellent and Wikipedia-worthy as this one is, that is not the book we will talk about here.