9 Aug
2022
9 Aug
'22
7:56 p.m.
On Tue, Aug 09, 2022 at 04:11:38PM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
We're probably well off topic now but...
Many years ago I ran into Bob Dewar on a visit to Cambridge University and
we got to talking. He said that the original implementation of SPITBOL, for
the System/360, was in assembler (of course), and written by him and
Belcher (?). The story he told was that they wrote it all down first, put
it on punch cards, and sent it to the IBM machine. The next day they got
back a listing with a bunch of errors. They iterated. By the fourth
round???fifth day???they had a working SPITBOL.
I still marvel at the productivity and precision of his generation of
programmers.
I had the same reaction to pic(1). You could look at the code and "see"
what it was doing. I've always believed that pic was so well designed
because it took a day to get the print out (back then), so you had to
have a language where you could see what it was doing.