The first song composed and played by a computer was The Silver Scale on May 17, 1957. This video discusses the physics and hardware necessary for this invention, as well as the domain specific language, MUSIC-V, that arose for efficient programming of sound waves.
Strings are a fundamental data type in programming languages, but their representation, functionality, and suitability for multi-lingual processing have changed over time. This article looks at the major changes in language design over the first fifty years.
Programming languages use format specifiers to control the formatting of numbers and text. We look at their invention in FORTRAN I, adoption in BCPL, and three innovative attempts to include them in ALGOL60.
In my earlier post on interviewing, I discussed aspects of a coding interview question that I thought provided better signal on the candidate than algorithmic-focused questions. In this post, I’ll provide an example fairly open-ended interview question, a solution, and a transcript between the interviewer and interviewee as an example for analyzing signal.