Complementary science of interactive programming systems

Tomas Petricek, Joel Jakubovic

Presented at HaPoC 2021.

Is it worth looking at the history of programming, not just for the sake of history, but in order to discover lost ideas that could be utilized by present-day computer scientists to advance the state of the art of programming? We answer the question in the affirmative, propose a methodology for doing so and present an early experiment that recovers a number of interesting programming ideas from, against all odds, Commodore 64 BASIC.

Draft and more information

• Download the HaPoC extended abstract (PDF)
• Check out the related Commodore 64 interactive essay

Talk recording

Watch a pre-recorded talk for the History and Philosophy of Computing Symposium:

Comments are welcome!

If you have any comments, suggestions or related ideas, I'll be happy to hear from you! Send me an email at tomas@tomasp.net or get in touch via Twitter at @tomaspetricek.