Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? (1977) [pdf](worrydream.com)

7 points by tosh 7 months ago | 1 comments

Los Alamos bets on ENIAC: Nuclear Monte Carlo simulations, 1947–1948 (2014) [pdf](tomandmaria.com)

48 points by nill0 26 days ago | 1 comments

A 2014 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing paper by Haigh, Priestley and Rope reconstructing the 1948 ENIAC Monte Carlo nuclear simulations run for Los Alamos.

Konrad Zuse (1994)(xn--plankalkl-x9a.de)

72 points by tmalsburg2 2 years ago | 41 comments

A Mathematician's Lament (2002) [pdf](worrydream.com)

88 points by xeonmc 4 months ago | 7 comments

Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)(asc.ohio-state.edu)

341 points by ent101 2 years ago | 136 comments

Excerpt from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" where Feynman recounts recovering from burnout by playing with physics, starting with a wobbling plate.

Mathematics for Computer Science (2018) [pdf](courses.csail.mit.edu)

366 points by vismit2000 9 months ago | 62 comments

PDF of the 2018 revision of the MIT textbook Mathematics for Computer Science by Eric Lehman, F. Thomson Leighton, and Albert R. Meyer.

The seven programming ur-languages (2021)(madhadron.com)

320 points by surprisetalk 3 years ago | 167 comments

An essay on the madhadron blog arguing that programming languages descend from seven fundamental 'ur-languages' that learners should explore, rather than near-identical mainstream ones.

Limited Liability In Historical Perspective (1997) [pdf](scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu)

12 points by gradus_ad 24 days ago | 3 comments

A 1997 Washington and Lee Law Review article by Robert W. Hillman examining the history of limited liability for business owners.

Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)(philzimmermann.com)

174 points by GaryBluto 12 days ago | 65 comments

Phil Zimmermann's essay from the original 1991 PGP User's Guide, updated in 1999, explaining why he created PGP to protect the privacy of personal communications.

Fabrice Bellard: The Ghost in the Code(zbruceli.org)

5 points by ptidhomme 19 days ago | 0 comments

A long-form blog essay profiling Fabrice Bellard, the reclusive programmer behind widely used software like FFmpeg and QEMU.

I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed(jamesdrandall.com)

705 points by jamesrandall 8 months ago | 556 comments

Personal essay by a 50-year-old developer who began coding BASIC in 1983, reflecting on how the craft of programming has changed, including with AI.

The future of programming (1982)(dl.acm.org)

56 points by vismit2000 9 days ago | 13 comments

ACM Digital Library page for the 1982 Communications of the ACM article "The future of programming" by Anthony I. Wasserman and Steven Gutz.