Dr. Dobb's Developer Library DVD 6 (2010)
archive.org
archive.org
- The Small C compiler set of articles, where you will get the sense not even K&R C was used outside UNIX for quite some time, only a common subset.
- The toolbox articles creating a Turbo Vision like framework in Object Pascal
- The evolution of Python and related adoption
- Strange programing languages like Actor, C@+ (try to search this one nowadays), Sather, BETA
- The fashionable compiler benchmarks that used to be quite common back in the day
- The evolution of C and C++ at ISO, while their standards were being started
- A more heterogenous way of software development, when it wasn't only UNIX clones and Windows.
I think not even Wikipedia knows about this (at least with a quick search)
Edit: Yandex can search for it! But doesn't seem to find anything relevant.
(It also hates such queries and will force you to wait 2 minutes for a captcha to load.. but you get the results after a long wait! As our forefathers once did!)
I did find C@ and C@++ though.
Edit: pasting a comment of mine from here in 2019 [1]:
The language is C+@ [2]. I dug up an article about it in Dr. Dobbs Journal, the October 1993 issue. This does not seem to be the article I am remembering, since it does not go into the instruction interleaving technique anywhere near as much as I remember, but they do mention it and say it was called "beading":
The binaries produced by the C+@ compiler are independent of the underlying machine architecture. Without recompiling, applications can be moved from SPARC to 68000 to Intel x86, and so on. C+@ is not interpretive--the binaries are encoded using a sophisticated 'beading' technique developed at Bell Labs. Because of the streamlined language design, the C+@ compiler produces these portable binaries with extraordinary speed, without the need for preprocessing or front ends.
This is from the article's introduction:
The C+@ programming language, an object-oriented language derived from AT&T Bell Lab's Calico programming language, was developed to provide programmers with a true object-based language and development environment. C+@ (pronounced "cat") has the syntax of C and the power of Smalltalk. Unlike C++, C+@ includes a mature class library with more than 350 classes used throughout the system. The C+@ compiler itself is written in C+@, and all of the source for the class libraries is included with development systems. The Calico project was started at AT&T Bell Labs in the early '80s, after the introduction of Smalltalk and at the same time as C++. Calico was originally used for rapid prototyping of telecommunication services; hence, its heavy emphasis on keeping the language syntax simple and showcasing the power of the graphical development environment.*
Folks can get a sense of C+@ from https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/DDJ/1993/9310/9310b....
The links to the figures still work, as of today.
https://archive.org/search?query=Dr.+Dobb%27s+Developer+Libr...
And the journals:
https://archive.org/details/texts?tab=collection&query=Dr.+D...
The amount of useful material they have gathered is impressive.
I made a good-faith effort at searching the site for anything requesting volunteer work, and came up empty. Got a pointer? What are they looking for?
I'm a very active volunteer and can always use the help of folks that have tech experience already. We get lots of student volunteers that require a lot of work to shepherd. As such, issues tend to be claimed pretty fast but also medium sized ones don't always get through the finish line.
Anyway, if you're seriously willing to commit some time you can tag me on their slack/github (@raybb). I'm currently doing a lot of performance related work (primarily migrating their codebase to fastapi) and I could use help but don't always open issues for it because sometimes guiding a non-experienced person is more work than just doing it.
There's also quite some design work going on to move things into the modern age and more reliable. One small thing that comes to mind is getting rid of jquery where it's used casually (not where a library depends on it). We have a few files like that.
Happy to chat more with anyone who is seriously willing to spend time to tackle medium sized issues with a few rounds of feedback!
I wonder if r/datahorde folks can be of any help here.
r/datahorde is different, and a ghost town.
I ended up on Michael Swaine's Medium site [1], and then ordered his book: "Fire in the Valley" (2014) [2].
And PoCoGTFO https://alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/
These are free modern magazines that capture the feeling of joy of programming that Dobbs and BYTE used to have
There'a also Visual studio Magazine but it's obviously Microsoft-centric [1].
Also CODE magazine [2] but it's more lightweight, feels more "commercial".
[0] https://accu.org/journals/nonmembers/overload_issue_members/
obj<-method arg1 arg2;
obj<-method << arg1 << arg2
Before the internet it was a good way to have a picture of what was out there. I remember the magazines had a particular smell in early 90s. Like a sweet smell, different to other magazines. There was rarely an Mac content though, which seems shortsighted. Swaine started writing Mac articles at some point if I recall, but they weren't very technical, often about hypercard?
I was reading this article from '91, the creator of Wizard C, Bob Jarvis criticised C++'s lack of modules, something it's getting around 35 years later. 91 was when Mode X graphics programming was introduced by Abrash in a series of articles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702136
It looks like CiteseerX from PSU is now effectively offline and everything is redirecting to the Wayback Machine. But many of those links are not in the Wayback Machine. Hopefully there is - or can be - some focused effort to get that content transferred over, if the citeseerx site is really going away for good.