the guy by the door …

I stopped by OPML camp in Austin Hall today. It reminded me of my days at Intermetrics working on the Ada Integrated Environment. It was supposed to be a full suite of tools for writing software. Ada was conceived as a “broad spectrum” language – a kind of a Swiss Army knife approach to language design. While most compilers to that time had two ends – front and back – AIE had three with the included “middle end” so the translation from ‘high level language’ to naked bits passed through not one but two intermediate languages [IL’s]. The front end obeyed then current design principles – one did not write a parser, but rather a parser generator which then wrote the parser. But to be a little more than modern the two IL’s were written and read not by hand written modules, but by modules generated by programs. These latter were, unfortunately, of necessity touched by human hands.

The first $4,000,000 bought a compiler which could compile The Null Program. This is the program that loads into memory, does nothing, and achieves a normal [non-error] exit. And this feat was only possible because Seth Tucker Taft stayed up all night the night before the brass came, massaging each of the various intermediate forms by hand to get it to jump through the next hoop. [Tucker is a Harvard alum unlike most of his family which went to Yale.]

I’m trying to see that things are better now. I’m having a hard time.

AIE was paid for by the Air Force. I did not like the feeling, but the 60’s were clearly over and I didn’t think I could put off any longer figuring out how to survive in the ruling paradigm. Some people called the AIE a “baby burner.” That was unfair. Those of us who worked on it and still cared about such things called it a “baby burner generator.” That was fair. OPML is clearly not a BB and not clearly a BBG. Some good news. On the other hand, it seems like more and more abstraction layers with associated learning curves. More buttons and dials, less ideas holding it all together. In exchange for this the user gets benefits that are large in anticipation. BUT …

I’m trying to see that things are better now. I’m having a hard time.