Course in History of Programming languages

This course is based on the ACM SIGPLAN conference History of Programming Languages (HOPL).

Deadline: June 19

Schedule

Meeting 0:

• Decide a schedule and choose languages

Meeting 1:

• Time: Tuesday, February 10, 15.00-17.00
• Location: LUCAS room
• Beta (Niklas)
  • The When, Why and Why Not of the BETA Programming Language (51 pages, double column). Optional: 6. Implementations of BETA (2 pages)
  • Presentation
  • Assignment
• Simula (Jesper Ö)
  • The development of the SIMULA languages (40 pages)
  • Presentation

Meeting 2:

• Time: Thursday, February 26, 13.15-15.00
• Location: Glasburen (NOTE!!!)
• Haskell (Mattias)
  • A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class (46 pages, double column). Optional: Part III: Implementations and Tools (7 pages)
  • Presentation
  • Haskell Assignment
• Algol 60 and Algol 68 (Niklas)
  • The American side of the development of Algol (10 pages, double column)
  • A history of ALGOL 68, sections 2.1-2.3, 2.8 (34 pages)
  • Presentation
• Extra presentation on Simula Coroutines (Görel)
  • Presentation, including voluntary exercises

Meeting 3:

• Time: Thursday, March 12, 13.15-15
• Location: LUCAS room
• C and Unix (Jesper N)
  • The development of the C programming language (28 pages, including transcript)
  • The UNIX time-sharing system (24 pages)
  • Presentation
• C++ (Mattias)
  • A history of C++: 1979--1991 (54 pages)
  • Presentation

Meeting 4:

• Time: Monday, March 30, 13.15-15
• Location: LUCAS room
• Prolog (Maj)
  • The birth of Prolog (37 pages, including transcript) (Alternative download: http://www.cs305.com/book/programming_languages/Conf-01/HOPLII/p331-colmerauer.pdf)
  • Presentation
• Erlang (Jesper Ö)
  • A history of Erlang (20 pages, double column)
  • Erlang (8x3 columns)
  • Finding race conditions in Erlang with QuickCheck and PULSE (12x2 columns)
  • Presentation and assignment

Meeting 5:

• Time: Monday, April 13, 13.15-15
• Location: LUCAS room
• Smalltalk (Gustav)
  • The early history of Smalltalk (53 pages)
  • Presentation
• Self (Jesper N)
  • Self (43 pages, double column)
  • Presentation
  • Assignment (You will need Self to read and run it)
• Extra material
  • Smalltalk metaclass circularity
  • Video of Alternate Reality Kit

Meeting 6:

• Time: Monday, April 27, 15.15-17, UPDATED
• Location: LUCAS room
• Fortran (Maj)
  • The history of FORTRAN I, II, and III (14 pages, double column)
  • The rise and fall of High Performance Fortran: an historical object lesson (18 pages, double column)
  • Presentation with assignment
• Lisp (Gustav)
  • The evolution of Lisp (69 pages) Optional: 6.2.6, 6.2.7, 6.2.11, 6.2.12 and 6.3.5 (~20 pages)
  • Presentation
  • Assignment
  • Clojure (needed for the assignment)

Course work

• Read papers before meeting. Around 50 pages single column or 40 pages double column for each language.
• Write a short review of the papers after each meeting (1 page)
• Present two languages (2x20 min presentation)
• Prepare one simple assignment for one of the two languages. Include instructions on how to run the compiler.
• Solve all 6 assignments

Course credit

6*10 (read) 
6*4 (write)
2*12 (presentation)
1*16 (construct assignment)
6*4 (solve assignment)
6*2 (meeting)
= 160 hours => 6 hp

Examination

Görel is the examiner.

• Email your reviews to niklas.fors@cs.lth.se and gorel.hedin@cs.lth.se
• Email your assignment solutions to the presenter, NF and GH.

Participants

• Niklas (NF)
• Jesper Ö (JÖ)
• Jesper N (JN)
• Maj (MS)
• Mattias N (MN)
• Gustav (GC)
• Christoff

The number of participants is limited to 6 PhD students.

Reviews

Assignment progress