Keynote session: The History of Programming - Mark Rendle [DevCon 2016]

[@srshk257]

Never knew a 75 minute talk on the history of programming languages could be this entertaining. Cheers, Mark.

[@jonas1015119]

"there was no concept of open source, because Bill Gates hadn't invented closed source yet"

[@tim1398]

Let's not forget Sun buying the rights to Bell Labs/ATT Unix in the late 80's and declaring they would not license the source to competitors (making it closed source). That's what sparked HP, DEC, Apollo and others to create and fund the Open Source Foundation, and really gave a boost to GNU etc.

[@MarkRendle]

The audience were actually great and laughed plenty; there were no microphones pointing at them so it didn't get onto the video.

[@bierundkippen720]

I doubt that. You can hear them laughing at times. But mostly they wouldn't laugh about your bad jokes. The awkwardness reaches its peak when you laugh about your own jokes and no one's laughing with you. Or when you just breathe into the microphone waiting for people to laugh, but no one's laughing.

[@lukedunn]

You're a great speaker Mark, just left me regretting that when I asked for a spectrum for Christmas my dad turned up with a trs-80

[@dillonjohnlane]

@@bierundkippen720 Not sure I'd take comedy advice from someone with a chris griffin profile picture.

[@bierundkippen720]

@@dillonjohnlane You got a point there. I chose this pic once because I found it funny, but I didn’t know the guy. Then I watched the show...

[@bignaughtydog]

@Bier und Kippen maybe it was because the audience was Dutch!

[@ChooseBSG]

I'm sad about the lack of laughter at your jokes.

[@benjamintarver7714]

well, they ARE computer programmers...

[@spritefun9362]

It's definitely the room and not the speaker...

[@burnedflowers2266]

@@spritefun9362 True I found him very engaging. His jokes were funny and informative at the same time aha

[@elultimopujilense]

I hate tese kinds of comments. Do you realize that microphones arent pointing at the audience?

[@skellious]

its not a UK audience.

[@elye3701]

Nice. Anyone who knows about Tommy Flowers deserves to be heard. As an passionate IBM observer, I am surprised you dont even mention Forth, REXX, EXEC and EXEC2. To protect my VM signon, I wrote a second splash screen parodying VM/370. mine was VM/380 and the PUT level was the key to a mutating password. You needed to 9s complement the put level to get the password but I took this a step further in case there was someone observant nearby. I typed in a random string of characters and embedded the password inside that. It completely fooled everyone. The wrong random string of characters forced a logout. It could be overcome but I am not revealing that trick. I trusted myself enough to edit that into my PROFILE EXEC.

[@forumulator800]

Many people, even at conferences, usually talk robotically. Not this guy. You could see that he was really invested in trying to make the audience enjoy it. Loved it! Usually I go 1.5x on lectures, but I watched this one properly. Great properly timed and demo'ed :D jokes. At one point, he was jumping on the podium! .

[@sn1000k]

He's more into talking in a really corny way

[@edgeeffect]

Animated and interesting talk... but SO many historical inaccuracies I can't count them all.

[@geoffas]

As an application programmer I made a freelance living for 20 years using xBASE; that is: dBASE II, dBASE III, dBASE III+, FoxBASE, FoxPRo, Visual FoxPro. For control systems, I used FORTH. Others included many dialects of BASIC (Thoroughbred, Vax, Apple, Microsoft) and BCPL for applications and operating systems. I'm showing my age, so I'll go for a lie down now ;-)

[@salahaddinhashimalhusam7697]

Thank you Mr Randel for your tremendous efforts.

[@grimvian]

Now, retired from an IT career, I wanted to code again as a hobby. I relearned Basic, but no decent debugging tools. Then a lot of C++, inheritance, composition, encapsulation and then realized, that I only had scratched the surface of C++. Will I use my probably last 10 years to learn a language, I find more and more weird and constantly expanding - absolutely not! A short look at Pascal - no way. Then I had a look at K&R and felt quickly in love. I like the way C rewards you, when the logic is working and bites you very hard, when the logic sucks...

[@reks724]

That has got to be the driest crowd ever. The jokes were funny 😂

[@forumulator800]

I know right? I laughed aloud several times. Talk about a dull crowd!

[@scowell]

Unfortunate about the confusion of telegraph and telephone... Enigma/Bombe and Lorentz/Colossus. Plenty of good books out there to learn the real stuff.

[@edgeeffect]

This talk has so many historical inaccuracies compiling them all into a comment would take too long.

[@etsemimichael9194]

Great Stuff.....history shared was short of boredom in every wise.

[@SunSay]

The address language was several years ahead of Fortran and already had complex structures: tree-like formats. Abstract data types are similar to the address programming tree-like formats. The naming of pointers is hardware implemented in the computer "Kyiv". It is a pity that you do not know it.

[@octanebd]

narrative and history are two different things! Sometimes one being subset of another.

[@hernanwilkinson]

The talk is funny and interesting, but also full of historical mistakes like saying that Backus created ALGOL or the C descends from B that descends from ALGOL and many others. ALGOL-58 was create by a committee of the ACM and GAMM, ALGOL-60 by an USA and EU committee, Backus was part of those committees but not the only inventor. C descends from B that descends from BCPL, not ALGOL. Apple did not created Objective-C, and so on.

[@rmw1246]

Absolutely true about the ancestry of C. In fact BCPL was created by Martin Richards as a simplification of CPL which was, I believe, invented in Cambridge (England). BCPL has the distinction of being type-less.

[@FergalByrne]

Colossus was designed to decipher the Lorenz (Bletchley called it ‘Tunny’) codes used by high command. Enigma was broken years earlier.

[@LuizDahoraavida]

Mark Rendle is a really great lecturer

[@Omnihil777]

Poor audience, Mark. I know you've spoken before better ones. Nevertheless a great speech. Like every time. :)

[@W00PIE]

Wow! Had some serious flashbacks during this time travel. I came across some old friends and foes: Pascal, Basic (on my Commodoe C16). I wonder that you did not mention Delphi? It was the cool kid of the late nineties, I think (according to it). Today my biggest love is Golang, at least for the heavy-duty server stuff domain.

[@SuperSrjones]

When I was writing NATO Identifying data for Stock Code entry detail to be printed on Microfiche and loaded to a computer mainframe in a hidden basement somewhere, we used to fill in a form like the one you showed here which would go off to the ladies who would read it and decide they did not understand the technical term you used and they would circle the offending word and send it back to you 3 days later. 9 days later your data would be uploaded, after two more resubmits. When you checked the screen entry, there would be a typo and to correct it you had to redo the initial correct form set again.

[@mellertid]

The computer read microfiche? Like miniaturized punch cards?

[@ineedsolution]

You forget about Polish chaps who also helped to broke the Enigma code.

[@lukasz548]

That's quite common unfortunately...

[@Balkac]

Great talk, I had no idea about some points in history of languages you pointed. Fun and full of interresting info, thanks.

[@BikermanCoUk]

Nono...the first affordable UK computer was the ZX80 from Sinclair - I had one.

[@Easy369-wcb]

super funny and informative. I love this guy!

[@cyberoptic5757]

Loved this. Yes, I had the first C book and once did a 2-year project in Objective-C. Ouch

[@JonathanGalimore]

Fun talk! Does anyone remember Lingo? Macromedia Director language. It was one of the first languages I learned on, and still have fond memories of its syntax. Also, where’s Assembly?? and occasionally you sound a bit like John Cleese doing standup (that’s meant as a compliment 🙂)

[@StephenTravisPope]

Great talk! Minor nit: ObjectiveC had a good life before Apple adopted it; it was developed and sold by Productivity Products Inc (PPI) in the early/mid 1980s.

[@arioriabdulrafiu8773]

I wish he was given extra time to calmly explain the rest. I was a great interesting video class.

[@kshitizsharma4445]

Simply Amazing.

[@projectdae3807]

I learned alot from this! Thank you

[@domicioannioulpiano6845]

I'm not a native speakes, but this is like listening to John Cleese for some reason. I'm always expecting the pun just before he stops a phrase

[@victoryiu1481]

This is a wonderful talk! well done, bravo!

[@nathangwyn6098]

Pretty sure there is a movie about tommy flowers and allan turing.... excuse if im.spelling wrong but yeah there is an A/B list movie about this and it was pretty good.

[@erickbenjaminperez3131]

Thank you for the presentation; I learned tons of information. I was confused at times when you seemed irked by simplified programming languages. Isn't that the purpose to make programming more user friendly? Thanks again and as a beginner in this area I will take your advice and start by reading that C programming language book you suggested.

[@Atameow]

great keynote session but the video editor should have switched the presentation and host.

[@Russtopia]

@19:10 Fortran the only array programming language?! Why not APL or its descendants? Many would argue arrays (and matrices, and ...) are 'more native' to APL than any other language family.

[@ultraviolet.catastrophe]

Great talk, Richard Quest!

[@ultranero2678]

Very interesting and informational but i just have to watch it and answer some questions for my shool

[@АлексейКосарчук]

Wait! What about Karl Zuse and his Z3 which was actually the FIRST turing-complete computer ever built?

[@ikemgee]

He obviously don't like germans (:

[@hansvetter8653]

I distinguish between configuring & programming.

[@BryonLape]

I have the C book, the companion, and the C++ version.

[@jessicahainesmusic]

Great talk, very engaging and upbeat. Thank you.

[@badjumpcuts6599]

37:00 Actually, The C Programming Language only had two editions. A third would be nice to demonstrate C11 features.

[@adityachavan8576]

Really funny guy... loved the whole talk.... thanks for such a delightful intro to various programming languages till date....

[@usnavyfish]

Great talk! Many laugh out loud moments

[@SarahYOUTwo]

LMAOO he’s hilarious. I love this teaching style

[@Sir_Winston_Smith_Oceania]

Did the speaker really leave out RPG? RPG was more popular than many of the languages mentioned. That would have been interesting for some because it was based on the 80 column paper card even when monitors were introduced. Everything needed to be in a certain column. Not RPG mention = blue screen of death.

[@tim1398]

Did I miss Ada being mentioned? (Nobody misses Ada:)

[@tomsaltner3011]

Is there a special reason for omitting Konrad Zuse‘s machines?

[@hoonoh4907]

brilliant talk thanks for this =D

[@veganaiZe]

@44:31 Liskov substitution principle is one of the most important tenets in OOP and abstraction. Way to just gloss it over, effectively belittling one of the most important women & principles in all of software.

[@reinhardt_tv]

Nah

[@veganaiZe]

Well articulated. Let me guess, you never write code without a 3rd-party framework? Or maybe you just never write code.

[@reinhardt_tv]

veganaiZe nope, this is way simplier, Ima haskeller

[@veganaiZe]

That explains a lot.

[@shaggyaxe]

55:46 For those who have never seen perl -- he's joking. It's really: print "Hello, World! ";

[@nirupanaidu2395]

'A boy', 'A Girl' 🤣. Was fun to hear!

[@hotfishdev]

Guys says that Clojure isn’t a lisp, and I don’t really understand why.

[@ikemgee]

58:00 where the real fun begins 😅😅

[@zemariagp]

this guy has some soul searching to do

[@stocklilves4060]

Gold.

[@DmitrySapelkin]

How come no Forth and derivatives mentioned? Logo doesn't really count

[@yoy58913]

Very informative

[@z3r0xk0x1]

17:25 Interesting Parts

[@fartzy]

Wow awesome!

[@BryonLape]

Start of a trend? That trend is older than civilization.

[@justlaugh5804]

Uprad students attendence here......

[@ukyoize]

Could you allow subtitles?

[@seanlee566]

Please, I don't want to be a stickler, but isn't "come from" somewhat more semantically encompassing in cases where the function call returns data

[@veganaiZe]

@37:00 3rd edition of The C Programming Language ?

[@breebw]

Yes. Amusing. His talks are sort of the Alcoholics Anonymous of dev talks. Various things are pointed out that are bad for you in life. Then later you learn whose really behind AA, a church group who try to get you to come along. Or in this case how great C#, .NET and the Microsoft way is(hes a proponent of MS services).

[@icecubatron]

VM Varga from fargo season 3 talks about programming

[@davewatts850]

How in the WORLD do you boldly claim to walk through the history of programming languages and not even mention Assembly Language??

[@MarkRendle]

That is a very good point and one I will definitely address if I ever give this talk again. Thanks :)

[@JaquelineVanek]

:D

[@JaquelineVanek]

are ya sure? how bout teh iq thingie

[@bierundkippen720]

Why isn't he mentioning the Z1-Z4 machines, designed and built by Konrad Zuse? These were built way before the Manchester Baby. Is it because that guy was German?

[@vijitkothari6502]

I was also amazed initially but when I continued then realized that the person is not an expert in this History, he is just entertaining and just killing time. But I am an Indian and don't worry, actually there are a lot of people who are credited with creating the first computer so everywhere one or the other person is left out. He is British and he didn't mention George Boole considering he is NOT telling history of computers but Languages.

[@devdeeep2388]

Some great jokes were wasted on that audience :( Brilliant talk!

[@unitylearning8181]

Wow this is a very neat and funny talk! I'm confused about something though. I'm not trying to take credit away from Ada Lovelace, but how is Heron of Alexandria not the first programmer? He built the first programmable thing, surely he programmed it right? I doubt that he didn't test out his own invention. Is it because he didn't create some kind of documented program for it on paper?

[@franklauter7466]

So wrong with Pascal!

[@theanderblast]

Forth not mentioned, not that I really care.

[@Misteribel]

Mark, excellent as always, but how could you have missed Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner from 1672, a working mechanical calculator, which ultimately led to the industrially produced, still famous arithmometers of 1815-1915 (invented at roughly the same time as Jacquards loom machine).

[@caballerosalas]

This talk is full of errors. For example, Apple didn't create Objective-C. Brad Cox created Objective-C and license it to Next Computers. Apple bought Next and with it, the Objective-C based technology known as NextStep, after that renamed as Cocoa.

[@kungfumaster8171]

oh my lord.

[@avi12]

1:04:32 Oh dear no... "Hello, World!" in JavaScript is better written as either console.log("Hello, World!"); or document.write("Hello, World!");

[@domicioannioulpiano6845]

Can someone tell which accent is this?

[@edgeeffect]

Somewhere around the South-East of England?????

[@RemcoJvGrevenbroek]

Heren means gentleman not toilet

[@jimmylzq7282]

o my god this guy is hilarious! i'm not gonna anything bad about pascal.... pascal is *** ahahah

[@picosdrivethru]

lol tough crowd

[@CrumpetTV]

Hey I Know You

[@radiodf]

Very interesting presentation, however the guy talking is a totally full of himself DBag,,.

[@drumetul_dacic]

59:58 lol

[@QqQ-h5h]

not very accurate. too much hand waving "I don't know so I don't care."

[@wiilillad]

The Camera guy needs to stop running around

[@Ailsworth]

OH yes, and aviation starts when a cave man looks upon a bird in flight and dreams of doing it himself, yes? Why was there no mention of Eckert/Mauchley? Computer programming necessarily begins with the first programmable computer, so why not mention these first steps? Why not a single word about "patch cables?" Most vexing of all, why no discussion of the evolution of assembly language? just say computer programming begins with Java and be done with it.

[@chrisstanford3652]

🤗😂🤣

[@keithmiddlehurst4036]

Why have industry failed to promote binary education, or to be against programming education as a sixth generation compiler, a via multi faceted user interfacing software, so designed to compile education employing binary systems, employing paged data files, built in composite form. Simpy write education at the home user desktop, as an essay, or listings, as lines of code represented as headings. In England the I.R.A. claim they would simply lose power in the north of England, as they cheat within current universities and school, as cretin.......

[@recreationalplutonium]

cringe/10

[@4ognen4ognen4]

Funny but not very informative. Each programming language gets just mentioned in terms of who created it and at what year, a helloworld followed by a few jokes. The whole talk could be 10mins long.

[@teckyify]

There are a looooooot of wrong things or opinions in his talk which are totally random and nobody cares about. Semi funny also.

[@W00PIE]

So where's your talk then?

[@Mirrari]

Great information, but an awful presentation.. Hands down the worst use of humor Iv'e seen in a lecture. I was facepalming so many times.. People are not laughing because the jokes are tiresome, childish and repetitive. It could have been such a better lecture without the constant unsuccessful need to make it funny.

[@W00PIE]

So when you don't get the joke, it is the presenter, of course ;-)

[@edgeeffect]

The information isn't up to much either.... it's like a game of historical inaccuracy bingo.