One of the perks of running a magazine like this one consists of discovering hidden pearls in the history of computing and how these connect to one another in uncanny ways. Take, for example, the case of this month’s Library choice: a book that is the forgotten kickstart point for a long series of outstanding and out-of-the-ordinary books.
We are talking about “A FORTRAN Coloring Book” by Dr. Roger Emanuel Kaufman, originally published in paper format by the MIT Press in 1978. This is the book that showed the non-standard, non-conformist path that many other great authors have followed. As we said in our article about _why last February:
Remember our article about programming artists? We have continued to honor those outcasts as often as possible: the aforementioned Kathy Sierra, Douglas Hofstadter, Geoffrey James, Andy Clarke, Jens Müller & Julius Wiedemann, Alex Wiltshire & John Short, Pastor Manul Laphroaig, Vikram Chandra, and even our beloved Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, one of the inspirations for the magazine you are reading right now.
I feel we should add to this illustrious list the “Oh! Pascal!” book series by Doug Cooper, published between the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of which showed the way to become a programmer to this author, more than 30 years ago. And of course, “The Cartoon Guide to the Computer” by Larry Gonick, who practically built his career on the stylistic foundation Kaufman laid. If you look at the index lettering in Gonick’s early books, the inspiration is a dead giveaway.
Oh, and before I forget, here is another one that comes to mind in the same style, which we talked about in our issue about the BASIC programming language three years ago:
The first is the memorable “10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10” (2012) by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, a book dedicated to a single line of Commodore 64 BASIC code; a title so unique that it deserves an entry in this Library section of its own.
Until we find even earlier examples of this style, I will quite safely argue that Dr. Kaufman was the first to approach the subject of programming with hand-drawn cartoons, lightheartedness, and joy. Why should all programming books start with a “Hello, World?” Why are there not any Rust coloring books available these days? (Ah, well, reading has also become a lost art, apparently.)
Dr. Kaufman’s résumé provides quite a few hints to the level of Renaissance Man he is. Professor Emeritus of Engineering and of Anatomy and Cell Biology at George Washington University, trained as an engineer and as an actor (I am not kidding, scroll down his home page and take a look at that MFA from Yale University), with a long list of published papers and research endeavors, and even some patents under his name, Dr. Kaufman wrote the definitive guide that shows us, 50 years later, how FORTRAN (still all in uppercase) used to be, merely 25 years after its creation.
(I wonder if Dr. Kaufman was in any way related to Andy Kaufman, another brilliant example of counterintuitive talent taken to the maximum. I can see parallels between them both. But I digress, as usual.)
As expected (or not), “A FORTRAN Coloring Book” is entirely handwritten and illustrated; a refreshing slap in the face for those of us who obsess over perfectly rendering our Markdown through intricate Pandoc, Typst, or LaTeX pipelines. There is no automated typesetting here. It is chaotic, brilliant, and deeply informative. I wish there were more books like this.
Some trivia from this gem? The rhyming and whimsical illustrations in this book were so effective that the American Mathematical Monthly reviewed it in November 1978 with a four-line poem. Even better, Ted Geisel (the one and only Dr. Seuss of Grinch fame) sent Kaufman a letter complimenting the book and wishing he would have had a text like that when he was a student at Dartmouth. The two authors traded autographed copies of their respective books.
Another juicy one: the book was on sale globally, from the MIT Museum Shop to the Smithsonian. However, a bootleg German publisher took the piracy game to a sickening new level: they not only plagiarized the book, but they actually translated the code examples from FORTRAN into Pascal. What do they say the highest form of flattery is? Well, there you go.
In this age and time when the art of programming is being sucked into LLMs and where juniors are left behind in their way to proficiency, let us remember the work of an author who truly believed there was a different way to teach them how to code.
Bonus: if you are interested in the complete history of FORTRAN/Fortran, I can only recommend you grab a copy of Mark Jones Lorenzo’s 2019 excellent opus “Abstracting Away the Machine: The History of the Fortran Programming Language”. Yes, regular readers of De Programmatica Ipsum will find the name familiar, and they should trust their instincts: we reviewed his book on BASIC three years ago. I actually debated for a while if I was going to write a review for this one, but I decided to leave that to others.
Dr. Kaufman’s book is freely available today in DRM-free PDF format, for your enjoyment, directly from the author’s home page. You can even find used copies on various online bookstores, so please do yourself a favor and get one of those. I know what I am talking about; I just ordered mine.
Cover art chosen by the author from the book.