Sam Ritchie demo
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Here's an early-2021 presentation by Sam:
The recording stipped before the URL of the Smart Notes book was given, could someone can reply and provide it?
In which he mentions Don Knuth and Literate Programming, something that was once vaguely on my radar, a book we carried at Computer Literacy Bookshops and came up in a 1993 interview I did with Don:
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CLB: I realize your current emphasis is on "literate programming", but were you ever whatsoever attracted to APL as a math-oriented language?
Knuth: That's another story. APL is for people who have problems to solve and don't care too much about efficiency; they want a nice elegant way to state the solution to their problem, but the solution that they come up with is not necessarily anything that a computer has an easy job doing. It's a problem specification language, but not a system programming language... there is an APL-WEB.
But I want to say more about IMP. The third thing against it was, if you made a mistake, the compiler would either get into an infinite loop, or it would stop on your first error and say "ERROR ERROR ERROR" and quit; you would have to figure out what the mistake was! It was not a great language or compiler.
However... it was still my language of choice, because it fit that operating system perfectly. The arrays would be named in a way that you could easily see in the debugger, and you could know where the storage was being allocated, you knew what was going on, and you could actually get your program running reliably, because IMP blended with the operating system. You couldn't do that with any of the other languages. You might be writing with a better language, but you would get your work done a couple of weeks later, instead of getting answers. I used IMP.
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I watched the video and noticed the shoutout to Alan Kay (he was a Computer Literacy Bookshops customer and one of my heroes when I was first bitten by the personal computer bug):
Note— we’ve never tried to build a text parser specific to a particular programming langauge so we could discuss program code in meaningful units; this graphic approach would be a very kludgy way to do it, but I know there are much better ways to accomplish that if code is all that is being annotated/discussed).
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