[SIGCIS-Members] Knuth

david nofre d.nofre at gmail.com
Fri May 16 00:50:51 PDT 2014


I enjoyed very much the discussion, thanks. I think we would agree that
the history of computer science as academic discipline is basically
undeveloped. So just an idea: invite Knuth & maybe other prominent
computer scientists to one of the SIGCIS Workshops to discuss with them
ways of writing the history of computer science?

David Nofre


On 05/15/2014 10:37 PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:
> Dag has a point, in that computer science offers few rewards to computer
> scientists for the writing of history. However it is also true that computer
> science offers few rewards to Ph.D. historians for the writing of history.
> We therefore focus instead on writing work that impresses our doctoral
> committees, might get us hired in disciplines and departments that actually
> do sometimes hire historians, might get us published in journals that count
> for our tenure committees, and so on through our careers.
>
> Thus it's not entirely clear why Knuth would expect historians to listen to
> his urgings to produce technical history useful to computer scientists when
> computer scientists themselves are not, as a community, willing to produce,
> reward, or pay for work of that kind.
>
> Tom
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
> Behalf Of Dag Spicer
> Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 2:51 PM
> To: members at sigcis.org
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Members Digest, Vol 47, Issue 11
>
> One of the serious issues Don hinted at was an insight from the sociology of
> science: there is no academic reward mechanism for people in technical
> fields to be writing histories.  Quite the opposite in fact.  I think it was
> Robert Merton who noted that histories written by technical people are often
> greeted with suspicion by fellow practitioners as something that is not to
> be done during one's academic career, which is nominally about creating new
> knowledge, rather than reviewing the past.  Typically, such synoptic
> disciplinary histories that *are* written are by people who are Emeritus, a
> point at which they have nothing to fear academically.
>
> So I wouldn't bother trying to "change Don."  He's merely pointing out the
> way things are in the Academy.
>
> Dag
> --
> Dag Spicer
> Senior Curator
> Computer History Museum
> Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
> 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
> Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
>
> Tel: +1 650 810 1035
> Fax: +1 650 810 1055
>
>
>
> On May 15, 2014, at 10:40 AM,
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> Today's Topics:
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>   1. Re: Donald Knuth (William McMillan)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 13:39:52 -0400
> From: William McMillan <wmcmillan at emich.edu>
> To: sigcis <members at sigcis.org>
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Donald Knuth
> Message-ID:
> <CAHwTMcnhK7mt-nJk-8jF8bu8E6iD+GyjAgdT=mymqz4pM7NNtQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Isn't the key idea that Knuth is getting at the distinction between
> technical histories and other kinds such as social and business histories?
>
> One can appreciate all of these, but if a course in a computer science or
> engineering degree program is to be turned over to history -- when the
> number of technical requirements is already almost more than a program can
> bear -- then that history course should probably support the technical
> content of the program.  If the course is fulfilling general education or
> other requirements then its content would not surprisingly be humanities or
> business oriented, and a dearth of heavy-duty technical topics would not be
> a problem.
>
> Many of us who teach in computer science programs would love to see
> textbooks and more papers on the technical history of computing so that we
> could use them in our programs.  Of course, the social, personal, and other
> aspects of history should not (and probably could not) be avoided, but we
> would need much more substantial and even coverage of the technical aspects
> of computing systems than we see in most current historical work.
>
> - Bill
>
> On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Paul N. Edwards <pne at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> I completely agree with Tom's analysis. A few additional questions re.
> Knuth?s abstract:
>
>   - Who is the ?we? in Knuth?s ?let?s??
>   - In what way has history ever been ?useful? to computer scientists?
>   It would be interesting to hear Knuth?s views on this - useful in
>   education? Personal interest? Celebration? Credit (reputation)?
>   - Finally, for what audience do people write internalist history
>   today? Who publishes it, and who actually reads it? Could someone create
>   some statistics, for example, on the number of downloads of Annals
>   articles, divided along some rough criterion between internal and external
>   history?
>
> In my view, as in Tom?s, there?s still a great deal of internalist history
> going on. A lot of it is at the level of raw materials - oral histories
> collected by ACM (I did a couple of these myself a few years back),
> collecting of documents and other archival materials, etc.
>
> The Computer History Museum ? probably the single best-funded institution in
> our field ? generally takes an internalist approach, though it does try to
> build a bridge to external history. It would be interesting to get some data
> on CHM visitors? backgrounds. I imagine it?s unbelievably hard to create
> compelling museum exhibits on the history of key ideas in algorithms,
> computer architecture, software engineering, etc.  Is CHM visited by
> computer scientists in search of their field?s past?
>
> Knuth?s idea that ?we only get a scorecard? is downright offensive. Aside
> from journalistic corporate histories, I can?t think of much professional
> history that fits this description ? certainly few people on this mailing
> list write that kind of thing. This makes me suspect that Knuth does not
> have much of a sense of the difference between journalism and professional
> historiography, nor of this SIG as a community. Can we educate him?
>
> P
>
> On May 14, 2014, at 12:19 , Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org> wrote:
>
> Hmm. I can't find an online video for it anywhere, which is an increasingly
> common practice for invited talks. We might try to get Knuth to write up the
> talk for Annals if he wants to make his case to the history of computing
> community.
>
> Here is the abstract:
>
> *Talk* Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science *Abstract * For
> many years the history of computer science was presented in a way that was
> useful to computer scientists. But nowadays almost all technical content is
> excised; historians are concentrating rather on issues like how computer
> scientists have been able to get funding for their projects, and/or how much
> their work has influenced Wall Street. We no longer are told what ideas were
> actually discovered, nor how they were discovered, nor why they are great
> ideas. We only get a scorecard.
>
> Similar trends are occurring with respect to other sciences. Historians
> generally no prefer "external history" to "internal history", so that they
> can write stories that appeal to readers with almost no expertise.
>
> Historians of mathematics have thankfully been resisting such temptations.
> In this talk the speaker will explain why he is so grateful for the
> continued excellence of papers on mathematical history, and he will make a
> plea for historians of computer science to get back on track.
>
> Annals liked to feature a quote from Knuth in its promotional materials, and
> of course he was involved in documenting the very early history of systems
> software back at the Los Alamos conference in 1976. So I suspect he is
> unhappy with the demographic transition that has taken place in the history
> of computing from eminent computer pioneers to younger, Ph.D.
> historians as the most active producers of historical work. This has
> naturally been accompanied with a shift in methods, questions, framing, etc.
> from an internalist approach centered on questions of interest to computer
> scientists to an externalist approach centered on questions of interest to
> one or another tribe of Ph.D. historians.
>
> It?s natural for Knuth to regret this, but it?s not clear to me that this is
> a zero sum game. His abstract reads as if there is a fixed pool of
> historians whose attention has unfortunately been diverted from substance to
> fluff.  It seems that the first generation of digital computing pioneers had
> an interest in technical history, stoked in part by the legacy of the ENIAC
> patent wars. Wilkes, Eckert, Mauchly, Zuse, Goldstine, Metropolis, the IBM
> team of Bashe, Pugh, et al, Malinovsky, Burks, Randell, Ware, Sammet, the
> LEO team, and many of their peers are/were active produces and consumers of
> technically and/or institutionally oriented history.  All had begun to work
> in computing by 1957, which seems to be about when Knuth himself first
> programmed. While many more people entered computing after
> 1957 than before it seems that subsequent cohorts have been much less likely
> to develop an interest in history. There are exceptions of course.
> Dave Walden, for example, is one of the most active members of the Annals
> board. Several ACM SIGs launched historical projects, following the three
> successful history events on the History of Programming Languages organized
> by SIGPLAN over the decades. ACM and IEEE CS both have history committees.
> Articles are written to celebrate the anniversaries of departments,
> technologies, etc. Just today we heard on this list of a project on the
> history of BSD. But overall it seems that the relative eclipse of technical,
> internal history of computer science and technology has a lot to do with a
> loss of interest in history among the people best equipped to write it.
> Neither have computer science departments embraced the history of computer
> science as an important area of teaching or research. As far as I know, no
> computer science program in the US has ever hired a faculty member
> specifically as a historian of computing ? which is different from the
> history of law, medicine, communications, and to some extent business where
> the disciplines in question have sometimes deliberately hired faculty
> members to teach and research history. Instead history has been an interest
> people have developed late in their careers, if at all.
>
> Knuth probably appreciates the efforts of De Mol, Bullynck, and their
> colleagues to establish the Commission for the History and Philosophy of
> Computing and the associated series of events over the past few years. This
> reflects an engagement with the history of mathematics, which as Knuth notes
> maintained a more traditional approach to the history of science. So it
> seems that there is scope for many historical traditions to thrive side by
> side.
>
> My other point is that ?the history of computer science? is a problematic
> category in this respect. Much technical history of computing is on the
> 1940s and early 1950s, before the emergence of computer science. The bulk of
> recent effort has been on Turing. Even my current work with Priestley & Rope
> on the history of ENIAC, which goes deep into technical analysis of early
> code, architecture, flow diagramming techniques, concepts, etc. is really
> about the history of computing practice and computing technology rather than
> the history of computer science. Furthermore relatively little externalist
> work on the history of computing is about computer *science*.
> Mahoney wrote about computer science, and there has been recent work on the
> history of Algol from the efforts of the SOFT-EU project, history of
> software engineering, and history of formal methods. Also coverage of the
> history of ARPA funding in the books by Norberg & O?Neill and Abbate, and a
> couple of articles on NSF support for computer science by Aspray. That?s a
> rather small proportion of everything written on the history of computing
> over the past twenty years. So in as much as the history of computer science
> is written at all, which is not nearly as much as it should be, the dominant
> approach is still internalist and technical.
>
> This might be an interesting topic for one of my ?Historical Reflections?
> columns in Communications of the ACM. So if you send your thoughts to the
> list these could help to shape it.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tom
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: members-bounces at sigcis.org
> [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org<members-bounces at sigcis.org>]
> On Behalf Of Ceruzzi, Paul
> Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2014 9:18 AM
> To: 'members at sigcis.org'
> Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Donald Knuth
>
>
>
> I heard that Donald Knuth gave a Kailath Lecture at Stanford last week on
> "Let's not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science." Did any of you attend
> this lecture? Is there a transcript available? I've seen the abstract and it
> appears to be of great relevance.
>
> Thanks
>
> Paul E. Ceruzzi, Chairman
> Division of Space History, MRC 311
> National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution PO Box 37012
> Washington, DC 20013-7012
> 202-633-2414
> http://airandspace.si.edu/staff/paul-ceruzzi
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> ___________________________
>
> Paul N. Edwards
> Professor of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> and
> History<http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/>,
> University of Michigan
>           A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of
> Global Warming<http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/vastmachine/index.html> (MIT
> Press, 2010)
>
> Terse replies are deliberate <http://five.sentenc.es/> (and better than
> nothing)
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