[FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

[Marcus Daniels]

Macsyma can generate Fortran, but Macsyma is itself is Common Lisp.  A few years ago there was the Fortress project out of Sun, but it was shut down shortly after the Oracle acquisition.   Fortress was looking more and more like Haskell as it progressed.   A symbolic math package implemented in Fortress would have been roughly a modern FORMAC.   There’s plenty of serviceable Python for these things, but without the unifying vision and compiler know-how.

I wonder what life was like as a working programmer at IBM in those days.   I assume it was depressingly regimented and the real hackers who could take something like this on were at the ivy league schools?

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Barry MacKichan
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2017 9:45 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the woman behind the woman


This triggers some personal memories. I have a letter from her, basically a rejection letter, saying I couldn’t have a summer job with them (Boston Advanced Programming group) until I finished my second year in college. Although I don’t remember ever hearing the name of the project, one of the IBMers described it to me as “like Fortran, but symbolic rather than purely numeric.” Clearly it was FORMAC.

I always assumed Jean Sammet was a (French) man, but now, 55 years later, I see “(Miss)” written before her signature.

By the next summer, I had pretty much dropped my interest in computers and spent the summer paddling a canoe to Hudson Bay and it took me about 20 years to get back into software.

--Barry


On 4 Jun 2017, at 11:01, Marcus Daniels wrote:

She had the right idea about FORMAC.   Only a reality now with systems like SymPy 50 years later.   But an evolved FORMAC would have been better, as it would have been a high performance numerics language too.



http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2017/05/24/jean-sammet-a-remembrance/

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