Tag: history

Programming History

LOL

1801 – Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave “hello, world” into a tapestry. Redditors of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

1940s – Various “computers” are “programmed” using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.

1957 – John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There’s nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

1986 – Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing “this language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk.” Modern historians suspect the 2 were dyslexic.

What Makes Us Happy?

For 75 years, in one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history, researchers have been following 268 men through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.
Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87K more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.
Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.
Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
On the other hand, warm childhood relations with fathers correlated with lower rates of adult anxiety, greater enjoyment of vacations, and increased “life satisfaction” at age 75—whereas the warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on life satisfaction at 75.

Vaillant’s key takeaway, in his own words: “The 75 years and 20y million $ expended on the Grant Study points … to a straightforward 5-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’ ”

Gruit

an old-fashioned herb mixture used for bittering and flavoring beer, popular before the extensive use of hops. Gruit was a combination of herbs, some of the most common being mildly to moderately narcotic: sweet gale, mugwort, yarrow, heather and Labrador Tea.