Thread by @moyix

Frank Herbert (yes that one), forgotten PL researcher (via @gwern's essay on genetics and Dune)

I'm skimming quickly and so far like 70 pages in it's just a LOT of Frank Herbert dissing computers

133 pages in and we are just about ready to turn the computer on. I feel like ol' Frank might have been getting paid by the word here

Frank Herbert's Dune? You better believe that's a LISP dialect (with apologies to @wilbowma)

OK finally on page 185 we're getting our first look at PROGMAP. The symbols:

Programming advice that has aged like a fine milk: "Use subroutines sparingly."

Ah the symbols are defined. I particularly like "FIN" – alternative end of a program.

I'm pretty sure this is all just to describe "FOR L = 1 TO N"

Despite his earlier harsh words toward computing machines, he does think they would have been pretty handy for, say, writing Dune

Oh come on, you can't wait until page 204 to admit this

"The biomachine is coming"

Picking up on a theme here

Appendix F has a worked example of a car maintenance program in PROGMAP; some excerpts

Appendices H–I provide a mortgage calculator but I don't have the stamina for that tonight

The full text (of which I have surely skipped over the best parts, in my haste) can be found on Gwern's site: gwern.net/docs/fiction/1…