The SNOBOL4 Programming Language [pdf]

SNOBOL4 was my first real programming language, thanks to a particular set of circumstances back in 1971 or thereabouts:

The University of Toronto had a High-Speed Job Stream intended mostly for undergraduates to run programs. It was in a fairly big space mostly occupied by students, keypunch machines, a few verifiers, and tables.

To run a program, you wrote your program on punch cards with a keypunch machine, then slapped a coloured header card at the front. There were cards for ALGOL, LISP, WATFIV, PL/1, and SNOBOL (amongst others).

Then you’d get in line for the punch card reader. When you got to the front of the line, you’d add your job to the back of the hopper, with other people’s jobs in front of yours.

Every so often, the machine would engorge itself on a bunch of jobs, queueing them up internally. As it ran the jobs, it would print the results on a massive and noisy line printer.

So after queueing your job up, you’d go hang around the line printer waiting for your output. If there was an error... It would be back to the keypunch and go stand in line again.

The room was unlocked and mostly unsupervised, so as a kid I would ride my bike over and play with FORTRAN. I had no books on the subject, so I'd either ask for help or go to the library to learn.

It was fun, but mostly it was just something to do for a bored kid. Then, one day, I found a copy of the "green book" somebody else had left behind.

I picked it up, started reading, and was hooked. I am embarrassed to say that I tucked it into my bag and took it home, when I really should have left it there or taken it to "lost and found."

Somewhere out there is a UofT grad who had to buy another very expensive textbook. I'm sorry, it was me.

Anyhow, the book captivated me. It was more than just a textbook or instruction manual: It sold the reader on a new way of thinking about programming, pattern-matching.

I felt the hugest "Aha" moment when I felt my brain literally unload the old program for writing programs, and start constructing a new program for writing programs.

I've been chasing that high ever since.