
IO Monad Realized in 1965 (2012) - dgraunke
http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/IO-monad-history.html
======
vezzy-fnord
Everything old really is new again.

This reminds me of a paper by Gary Kildall published in 1970 called
"APL\B5500: The Language And Its Implementation" [1], which I think will
fascinate many by just how modern it reads. Just about all of the terminology
and concepts were refined by then and remain identical to the present day,
when the conventional understanding of the software industry -- where
everything allegedly becomes obsoleted every 6 months, would dictate that it
must be hopelessly anachronistic by now.

We're not as innovative as we think we are.

[1] [https://www.cs.washington.edu/tr/1970/09/UW-
CSE-70-09-04.PDF](https://www.cs.washington.edu/tr/1970/09/UW-
CSE-70-09-04.PDF)

~~~
kwhitefoot
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.

------
amelius
This reminds me of the tutorial named "You could have invented monads" [1]. So
apparently, somebody did :)

[1] [http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-
monad...](http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monads-
and.html)

