Thanks for the first-hand account :-)
Don't be Whiggish in your understanding of history. Its participants
did not know their way.
Given your original narrative I really can't argue. Maybe, as you note, I'm
wrongly assuming everyone knew a significant part of that which had come
before them without accounting for natural propagation delays and barriers
between thought pools. Nonetheless, it can't be denied a lot of ideas, and
words used to denote them, in computation were conceived at earlier times
than one might expect, sometimes even more comprehensively than today. For
instance, von Foerster was consistently using "computing" in an
astonishingly wide sense, e.g. bio-computing, by the 1950s. Even today most
people don't immediately generalize that notion the way he did while such
generalization is more than warranted.
--On Sunday, September 06, 2009 11:03 -0700 Rob Pike <robp...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Are you implying Doug McIlroy hadn't been taught about (and inevitably
occupied by) Church-Turing Thesis or even before that Ackermann function
and had to wait to be inspired by a comment in passing about FORTRAN to
realize the importance of recursion?! This was a rhetorical question, of
course.
Doug loves that story. In the version he told me, he was a (math) grad
student at MIT in 1956 (before FORTRAN) and the discussion in the lab
was about computer subroutines - in assembly or machine language of
course. Someone mused about what might happen if a subroutine called
itself. Everyone looked bemused. The next day they all returned and
declared that they knew how to implement a subroutine that could call
itself although they had no idea what use it would be. "Recursion"
was not a word in computing. Hell, "computing" wasn't even much of a
word in math.
Don't be Whiggish in your understanding of history. Its participants
did not know their way.
-rob
