
Can you name the Programming Language if You Know The Creators? - fogus
http://www.sporcle.com/games/mi0tch/prog_lang_inventors
======
cgrubb
Grace Hopper invented FLOW-MATIC. She wasn't even on the COBOL design
committee.

If I were to choose a single inventor for Scheme, I would have chosen Sussman,
not Steele.

~~~
nene
Hmmm... I don't know much about COBOL, but Wikipedia tells me that she wrote
the initial specification of the language, and given that it doesn't look to
me as such a big stretch to name her at least as one of the main inventors of
the language. Although it might be the case that after the committee there
wasn't much left of the initial spec. But as I sayd, I hardly know anything
about COBOL.

~~~
cgrubb
Wikipedia's attribution of the work that took place in late 1959 on COBOL to
Grace Hopper is incorrect. Note that it was made anonymously by someone who
was fixing obvious vandalism. See

    
    
      http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COBOL&action=historysubmit&diff=283228831&oldid=283200503
    

I will summarize what I think is the correct story. I have "The Early History
of COBOL" by Jean Sammet, 1978, which can be downloaded from
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=808378> for $15. Sammet was on the
short-range design committee which did the work that Wikipedia mentions
occurring in late 1959. I also have a photocopy of the April 1960 CODASYL
report on COBOL which I acquired from the Charles Babbage Institute.

There was a meeting of various people at the University of Pennsylvania in
April 1959. They thought a "machine independent" language for data processing
could and should be developed and they suggested that the Department of
Defense lead the effort. In May 1959 there was a meeting at the Pentagon which
outlined high level goals for the language. It also said that the existing
languages FLOW-MATIC and AIMACO as well as the specified but unimplemented
language COMTRAN should be studied to determine what is wrong and right with
them. The May 1959 meeting also established a short-range committee, an
intermediate-range committee, and a long-range committee to develop the
language. The long-range committee would never actually meet. There was also
an executive committee for coordinating the other committees. Grace Hopper was
appointed as an advisor to the executive committee, but the executive
committee was political in nature and wasn't involved in design.

Most of the design work for COBOL was done by the short-range committee, which
met from June through December 1959. These people served on the short-range
committee:

Col. Alfred Asch, Robert Barton, Howard Bromberg, William Carter, Ben
Cheydleur, Miss Deborah Davidson, Norman Discount, William Finley, Charles
Gaudette, Roy Goldfinger, Dan Goldstein, Mrs. Mary K. Hawes, Duane Hedges,
Mrs. Frances E. Holberton, Miss Sue Knapp, Karl Kozarsky, Roy Nutt, William
Logan, Rex McWilliams, Vernon Reeves, Gerald Rosenkrantz, Miss Jean E. Sammet,
William Seldon, Edward Somers, Mrs. Nora Taylor, Miss Gertrude Tierney, Capt.
Erwin Vernon, J..H. Wegstein (Chairman)

After the short-range committee dissolved, work was carried on by the
intermediate-range committee at a slower pace. The following individuals are
mentioned as participating in the intermediate-range committee (though Sammet
thinks this list may be incomplete):

A. Eugene Smith (Chairman), Lester Calkins, Gregory Dillon, Roy Goldfinger,
Jack Jones, William Keating, Colonel Gerald Lerner, Robert Rossheim

As for the influence of FLOW-MATIC on COBOL, I am not aware of any FLOW-MATIC
manuals that are available online, unfortunately. Sammet's article lists 5
influences of FLOW-MATIC on COBOL, however. It also lists 6 influences of
COMTRAN on COBOL. Sammet says the FLOW-MATIC influences are

1) It worked! 2) Full data-names unlike FORTRAN (though limited to 12
characters in length) 3) It used full English words for commands 4) It used
less than a full machine world for each data item. 5) It separated data
description and commands.

------
superrad
Apart from a few the actual years of creation helped me more than the names of
the creators.

------
kunjaan
Missed Groovy. No regrets.

------
rayvega
Groovy and Scala but no Clojure?

~~~
baddox
Yeah, and I kept guessing Clojure on all the ones from the 2000s that I didn't
know.

------
aidenn0
I can't believe I missed basic and javascript! I'm banging my head against the
wall thinking "I know the name Brendan Eich, but where?"

~~~
jimbokun
18/19 can't believe I missed BASIC! Should have been process of elimination of
programming languages I've heard of at that point.

Most I got from the creators, managed to narrow down the others based on the
year.

~~~
DannoHung
Same here, I was guessing on a couple of the other ones though.

I was thinking that it was Algol or Simula or one of the other ones that is
super important in terms of influence but isn't used at all any longer.

------
l0nwlf
Score:9.

Consolation points: Did BASIC and Ada which many seemed to miss.

Old memories refreshed, LOGO followed by BASIC. When I first read about C, I
wondered how things ever worked without 'goto'. What the hell is this thing
known as recursion. :)

~~~
mahmud
_Did BASIC and Ada which many seemed to miss_

There was no Ada in the list. You couldn't list Ada's authorship and still
keep the entry-box above the fold.

------
joshes
17/19. Missed Erlang and Groovy.

The ones which came to me quickest upon seeing the name(s) were Python, Lisp,
C, Java, C++ and Go (because of the year). The one which was the hardest to
recall was Scala.

And the bonus was quick to memory, too.

~~~
cstuder
Scala was easy for people like me who took a compiler design class given by
Odersky at EPFL. We actually wrote a compiler for a simplified version of
Scala. I would have never thought to see that language again after university.
(That was about 6 or 7 years ago.)

------
khingebjerg
I thought James Strachan was the creator of Groovy.

~~~
vorg
I wonder how many of those other languages also really had a different creator
to that listed in the quiz, but had its official history rewritten.

~~~
mahmud
Scheme.

------
batasrki
15/19, missed Groovy (also no regrets), BASIC, COBOL and Ada Lovelace (put
Babbage)

~~~
tyweir
Same, missed basic, cobol, scheme and JS. :(

------
bl4k
anybody else put 'emacs' for Guy Steele?

------
sb
Missed Groovy...

I would like to see other very important people on this list, e.g., where is
Niklaus Wirth? or Alain Colmeraurer? or Chuck Moore?

------
andywood
15/19, but only because I wrote the back-end for this app:
<http://flashcards.educationlabs.com/#/Play/?deckid=0> and the Language
Creators deck was the very first test deck I made early in development. I'm
very impressed with those who actually knew all of them!

------
loup-vaillant
Sigh, I see no language with type inference. Nor any concatenative one. Nor
any non-strict one. So unfair.

~~~
frou_dh
C#'s `var` too weaksauce?

~~~
loup-vaillant
When I said "type inference", I actually had system F in mind. And I didn't
see ML (not even F#), nor Haskell, nor Miranda, nor Clean… So yes, `var` is
too weaksauce.

------
phr
16/19: No surprise that I missed php and groovy, but I should have guessed
fortran. I read somewhere that Backus was involved in the early stages of the
functional programming language movement, and got sidetracked by that. He is
also the B in BNF, of course.

------
futuremint
Got em all except BASIC, Groovy, Scala, C# & Fortran. Not very interested in
those languages anyway. I would have liked to see Haskell & Smalltalk on
there. Apparently I do as much reading _about_ programming languages as I do
_of_ them!

~~~
ygd
Tip: use *'s for italics, not _'s.

------
s-phi-nl
One they did not ask: Alan Kay

~~~
jpr
Or Niklaus Wirth:

<http://www.sporcle.com/games/supreddit/prog_lang_wirth>

------
weej
I feel ashamed that I didn't realize Guy Steel did Scheme nor that he is the
current Chairman of Common Lisp. Go figure.

Anything Lisp related just immediately makes me think of McCarthy.

------
duck
A little more info on Ada (which I missed):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace>

------
Groxx
3\. Bonus (how many _didn't_ get this one?), Perl (everything Perl mentions
Larry), and Ruby (because his name is Japanese).

Huzzah!

~~~
ohashi
I got the bonus, I didn't get many others besides Perl, C++ and a couple
others

------
jallmann
Missed groovy, scala and basic. Actually surprised I missed the latter, but
then again I never sat down and thought, "who invented basic?"

------
StudyAnimal
Got 17/19. I did not get Rasmus Lerdorf PHP. I also did not get the Ada
Lovelace one, but I should have, I just couldn't recall it.

------
acangiano
19/19, but I struggled a bit with the Basic one.

~~~
ralphc
Same here.

------
radioactive21
I only got three, coicidently all "C". C, C++ and C#. Dont ask me why I know
those three right away but struggle with the rest.

------
AndrewO
I feel like I cheated on BASIC: I didn't know the creators, but it was the
only big one from that era I didn't have yet.

------
nickik
14/19 How the hell did I get perl from larry wall? Never heard about those the
creaters of php, Groovy or basic.

------
daeken
15/19. Missed JS (wow), Groovy, BASIC, and Erlang. That was a bit harder than
I thought it'd be, honestly.

------
bockris
17/19. I didn't know groovy or scala.

------
babo
18/19 groovy was out of my radar.

------
mindstab
No smalltalk or erlang but a question about ada and not actually the language?

------
victzh
16/19, 2 minutes, got bonus for Ada, missed Groovy, PHP, and (sigh!) Erlang.

------
bluesmoon
14/19. Got many from the names, but a few I could guess just from the year.

------
MrMan
13\. got all the old langs and the bonus. Missed Scala and Php, oh well...

------
kingkilr
14/19, missed BASIC, C#, Groovy, Scala, and Ada Lovelace.

------
las3rjock
15/19; missed JavaScript, Groovy, Scala, and Erlang.

------
pluies
12/19. Oh well, at least I had Ada Lovelace. :)

------
danieldk
16/19, missed Javascript, COBOL, and Groovy.

------
geophile
17/19 - missed javascript and groovy.

------
mfukar
I got 4.

