Of all the articles I have written in this “Library” section, this has been by far the most difficult to write of them all. It is extremely hard to summarize in a thousand words the major achievements of a person that has defined the way our modern world and our industry work, in the most unfathomable ways.
It would of course be easy to single out authors who have made important contributions to the world of Free, Libre and Open Source Software for this month's Library article. I'm sure we'll address their work in later issues. One of the most important reasons for the success of Free Software is its collaborative nature so this month we'll acknowledge the community effort to document open source software.
The history of programming language books can be roughly divided in three distinctive eras. The first one stretches from the beginnings of programming to the mid 1970s. Programming books from those times were an often underestimated byproduct of the marketing budget of big companies such as IBM, and inherited the dry approach of most engineering books in the post-war era.
These days, it's hard to appreciate that Object-Oriented Programming is so easy, it was taught to kids in junior high before it was ever taught to adults. As supposedly senior software engineers debate whether a Car truly "is a" Vehicle, and whether it wouldn't be easier to learn lambda calculus and determine the median monad blog post than to reflect the real objects in the real-world problem they're solving in their software, it seems reasonable to ask: is it really so difficult?
From October 24th to 29th, 1927, twenty-nine scientists gathered in Brussels for the fifth Solvay Conference. Among the attendees, of which seventeen got a Nobel Prize before or after attending, were Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, and Albert Einstein. One might think there might have not been such an assembly of brilliant thinkers since the Platonic Academy.
Many developers will have heard of Barbara Liskov, through her appearance in Robert C. Martin's SOLID list of design principles. The abstract of her 1994 paper with Jeanette Wing, A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping, makes the principle sound easy in, well, in principle.
When the author of these words started its career as a software developer, "object orientation" was all the rage. "Serious" programming languages were object oriented. "Professional" programming environments allowed one to view "objects" and "classes" in all of their glory. Inheritance, not composition, was the way of the future. Design patterns names were the answer to actual interview questions.
The Kernighan and Ritchie book opens with the "Hello, World" example. The C++ Programming Language follows an annotated table of contents with "The purpose of a programming language is to help express ideas in code." Cox, on the other hand, opens with the story of Eli Whitney and the industrial revolution.
Somehow we all agree about the importance of history in our society. We teach it to our younger ones, we quote it in our speeches, we talk about it during our dinners. Maybe it is because we had to memorize the names of battles fought ages ago, and we expect to capitalize on that fact so as to appear wise (if not arrogant) to others. We might even agree with history itself, shaking our heads in dismay to some extent, as we see the events unfolding nowadays. A phenomenon which, by all measures, tends to increase with age.
A quote from the cover of Volume One of Professor Donald Knuth's Magnum Opus, "The Art of Computer Programming (3rd edition)": "If you think you're a really good programmer… read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming… You should definitely send me a résumé if you can read the whole thing." "Me" here refers to the author of the quote, Bill Gates.