[SIGCIS-Members] Paper on H.B. Curry's work on programming and on the ENIAC

[Paul McJones]

This looks like a very interesting paper. (I don’t have access to the Journal for Logic and Computation, but I found an earlier version that is open access: http://www.hapoc.org/node/40 .)

By the way, the Computer History Museum has scans of a number of historic documents collected by Knuth, including Curry’s 1949 Naval Ordnance Laboratory technical report "On the composition of programs for automatic computing” — see http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/KnuthDigitalArchive-Index.html .


Paul McJones


> On Sep 1, 2015, at 3:00 AM, Maarten Bullynck <maarten.bullynck at kuttaka.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear SIGCIS list members,
> 
> I would like to draw your attention to the latest issue of the Journal for Logic and Computation (Volume 25 Issue 4 August 2015, special issue "Computability in Europe 2010") that contains some articles of interest for the historian of computing.
> http://logcom.oxfordjournals.org/content/current
> 
> After five years of waiting, I am happy to see the paper on H.B. Curry's work on the ENIAC and on programming finally appear in print. The article not only discusses at length on Curry's work on the logical composition of programs (mentioned in Knuth and Pardo's paper on the history of programming languages), but it also shows the importance of Curry's experience of preparing ballistic computations on the early ENIAC (before it was rewired into stored-program mode) for this theory of programs. In this respect, the paper shows that one and the same machine (the ENIAC) may give rise to very different theories and practices of programming, Curry's case contrasting with the "classic" von Neumann style of programming (that has been (re)contextualized nicely in Haigh, Priestley and Rope's recent work).
> 
> Reference: Liesbeth De Mol, Martin Carlé and Maarten Bullynck: "Haskell before Haskell: an alternative lesson in practical logics of the ENIAC", J Logic Computation (2015) 25 (4): 1011-1046 (http://logcom.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/4/1011.full.pdf+html)
> 
> Another paper of interest is Edgar Daylight's discussion with Tony Hoare, "From mathematical logic to programming-language semantics: a discussion with Tony Hoare", pp. 1091-1110; as well as the tribute to Pour-El, "A Tribute to Marian Boykan Pour-El (1928–2009)".
> 
> best regards,
> 
> Maarten Bullynck
> 
> Département de mathématiques et histoire des sciences
> UFR MITSIC, Université Paris 8
>