IO Monad Realized in 1965 (2012)

the ancient Greeks actually had a fully-developed LISP, there's really nothing new under the sun.

It's rather odd that the idea that the software business changes rapidly is still the conventional wisdom. After all most of the really big ideas were created by people of my generation and the one before (I'll be sixty shortly and I wrote my first programs in Leasco time sharing Basic in 1969 at the age of fourteen). I still see and hear people talking about object orientation as something new yet it wasn't new even in the late 1980s when Turbo Pascal got objects, after all Simula was released in the mid 1960s and had pretty much all the basics of objects and classes.

Forgot to say thanks for the link. I was immediately stuck by the technical report name format 70-09-04, very nearly an ISO-8601 date.

I often get the idea that there's been sort of this slump of scale that occurred somewhere in the 80s where the pioneers of CS found themselves suddenly flooded with new people. The challenge moved from thinking of better ways to "do CS" to teaching what already existed.

Sometimes I think we're just now getting back around to where people were at in the 80s—albeit at much greater scale. Sometimes I think we're not there yet. Sometimes I think I'm just sort of thinking wistfully about some golden age of yore.

it just shows that language design is part of IT that moves slowly, because they are good enough. Also, we do happen to have a few millenia of experience with languages, whereas most people get by quite alright without solving numerical puzzles of all kinds.