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History of Programming Curious about the history of programming and the people who created the field? Then dig into some of the books listed below, which are among the best on the topic. If you have a book to recommend, please email me. History of Programming Languages-II Edited by T. J. Bergin, Jr., and R. G. Gibson, Jr. Addison-Wesley, 1996 In this proceedings of the Second ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference, you can find papers on the history of C and C++ (as well as ALGOL 68, Pascal, Concurrent Pascal, Ada, Lisp, Prolog, FORMAC, CLU, Smalltalk, Icon, and Forth), in most cases written by the original language designers. I attended the conference, which was held in 1993, and wrote an article about it for Dr. Dobb's Journal. They also published some of the photos that I took at the conference (the only time I've had any photos published in a national magazine!). A similar book was published for the first History of Programming Languages Conference (held in 1978), but it is out of print. Go to: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Scientists and Iconoclasts who were the Hero Programmers of the Software Revolution S. Lohr Basic Books, 2001 This book either has one of the shortest titles ever or one of the longest; I can't decide which. In any case, it provides a background look at the creation of FORTRAN, COBOL, Unix, C, BASIC, Algol, Pascal, C++, Java, and much more. Written for a nontechnical audience, it is short (250 pages) and easy to read. Code: Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software C. Petzold Microsoft Press, 2000 A masterful history of the computing field that focuses on the underlying codes (including binary numbers, machine language, and ASCII) that underly both hardware and software. Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists D. Shasha and C. Lazere Copernicus, 1995 The title is pretty much self-explanatory. The people profiled include a few programming language designers: John Backus (FORTRAN), John McCarthy (Lisp), and Alan Kay (Smalltalk). Click on the cover art or title to see each book's description at Amazon.com. To see a list of best-selling books on the history of computing at Amazon.com, click on the Amazon logo below.