This is a really fascinating read. I'm only really familiar with the Smalltalk side of ADTs/Modules/Objects that started gaining steam in the 1970s, due to Alan Kays prolific speeches. But this was all happening completely concurrently!
It's cool to see how people in the 70s were wrestling with concepts we take for granted today. Maybe some of their abandoned ideas are even worth pilfering - we're still a young field, which has its strengths.
Which is why everyone that has the opportunity to delve into history of programming languages all the way back to Fortran, can learn that C wasn't neither the first systems programming, nor the best at it, when one delves into what research institutes besides Bell Labs were doing.
I'm very much into the whole "non mainstream" computing thing. Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Lisp weenies, that schizophrenic dude who makes religious OSes with assembler, Chuck Moore, Ken Iverson - anything that's not nuget configuration file or a git error messages or sundry other things that makes me wish I was an electrician or an accountant.
There was less orthodoxy back in the day it seems, so it's always a breath of fresh air reading these older papers.
Thanks for posting this. My history with reading papers has been very poor in the past and I've now made a resolution for at least the next few months to fight my Hacker News addiction by preferencing papers or books over 'news'.
Barbara Liskov is one of the most influential computer scientists who even one a Turing award. So, I'd immediately think it was some historical or current work of Barbara Liskov if all I did was study CompSci. I'd already seen CLU as one of C++'s influences, though. The key contributions section should hint at its significance:
