Exciting story on history of SMP and Mathematica ( help Wolfram decrypt SMP code :) ) blog.stephenwolfram/2013/06/there-was-a-time-before-mathematica/ "A big early decision was what language SMP should be written in. Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a young physics graduate student named Rob Pike convinced me that C was the “language of the future”, and the right choice. (Rob went on to do all sorts of things, like invent the Go language.) And so it was that early in 1980, the first lines of C code for SMP were written. The group that worked on SMP was an interesting one. My first recruit was Chris Cole, who’d worked at IBM and become an APL enthusiast, and went on to found a rather successful company called Peregrine Systems. Then there were students with a variety of different skills, and a programming-enthusiast professor who’d been a collaborator of mine on some physics papers. There was some eccentricity along the way, of course. Like the person who wrote very efficient code, all on one line, with functions colorfully named so their combinations would read as little jokes. Or the quite brilliant undergraduate who worked so hard on the project that he failed all his classes, then promised he wouldn’t touch a computer—but was soon found dictating code to someone else." :)
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 21:15:14 +0000
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