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Critical Program Reading (1975) [video] (youtube.com)
53 points by ryzvonusef on Dec 27, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



Wonderful stuff. Gerald Weinberg had a huge influence on at least the 1990s generation of testers, with his ethnographic approach. He doesn't seem to have had as much influence on the same generation of programmers. Perhaps the techniques he described had already been internalised?

Dennis Geller is the author of Structured Programming in APL[2] and Tom Plum seems to have gone on to a career in writing books on C[3].

It looks like this film is just one part of a series, probably presenting approaches from Weinberg's early structured programming books[1].

I'd love to know where this gem was discovered and if the rest of the putative series still exists.

[1] https://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Bookstuff/Each_Book/Early_Bo... [2] https://books.google.ie/books/about/Structured_Programming_i... [3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1420419.Thomas_Plum


This is from a reel owned by youtuber TechnologyConnections.

Short clips of it appeared in his recent video about his film projector.

After that video went up he made a YouTube community post that reads:

Merry Christmas, everybody!

If you're interested in seeing the entirety of that programming film, I've uploaded it on Connextras. This is the only reel I have, unfortunately, so I can't show you part 2 (or three? maybe? don't have a clue how many reels there were).

Anyway, enjoy!


The idea of multiple-word-identifier not using an underscore threw me at first, but back in history, you couldn't always count on having underscores, etc. It only took a minute to get past it.

I was intrigued at the foreshadowing of Python's syntactically important indenting.



Guido Van Rossum must have watched this before deciding on using indention as a block structure in Python.


There were languages with indentation as a block structure before Python. PROMAL for the Commodore 64 is one.




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