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The Future of Programming (2013)

I gave a talk at the DBX conference called The Future of Programming. Below are links and quotes from some primary sources I used, as well as links to wikipedia and elsewhere where you can learn more.

This student took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying that it was a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work. The story I told in the talk -- "they didn't know what they were doing, so they tried everything" -- was essentially that programming at the time was in the "pre- paradigm phase", as defined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Much fundamental research at the time, including Engelbart's NLS and the Internet, was funded by ARPA, an agency of the US Defense Department which had been given significant resources due to the cold war.

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